Ableton Forum

i just got my 8Core MacPro - i was shocked when i run a simple VST like Phosycon - in 96Khz it was using 20% - but happily only in Live's Cpu Meter - the Sytem one said something around 3 -4 %

so it seems the Cpu Meter is only measuring a part of the cores?

Live's multiprocessor allocation works per track, which means that each track gets calculated by a different processor core. Let's assume you run a single track in your set with a number of plugins, so that the track takes up 40 % of core #1, then Live will of course display a total load of 40% as you have 60% left on core #1. Now right-click the track's title bar and choose 'duplicate'. You will now have 2 tracks using an identical amount of CPU power, but as the 2nd track gets calculated by core #2, Live's CPU meter will stay at approx. 40%. On an 8-core machine you should be able to run the track 8 times without a noticeable increase of the total CPU load in Live's CPU meter (it might however go up to 45% as there are of course some other things which need to get caluclated as well).

Despite the above mentioned things, Lives CPU meter will only measure the audio engine, not other tasks performed by the computer, e.g. managing Live's GUI. The CPU meter is designed to give you an idea of how much CPU resources you have available until your computer can't handle the audio streams anymore. It is not very reliable for academic measurements of a computers overall CPU load.

best,
nico

Hi,

why in the test results shown on this site that the quadcore comes in the same as the eight core harpertown macs. Overcloked q6600 was doing the test at 20 percent why isnt the eight core quicker.


Cheers