Sound quality - CPU efficiency equilibrium

[tony tony chopper]

Turn Lives multicore option off the same thing lots of crackle.

Yeah sure, that means it helps (it definitely does), but it doesn't say how much.

[tony tony chopper]

Samples sound better and cause just a fraction of the CPU load compared to synths.

I wouldn't say that either, synths aren't static like samples. Besides, good resampling has a CPU cost as well (more than for a basic synth).

[Kaboom75]

Who cares what the OS CPU meter says fact is it improves DAW performance a good sound vs a crackly CPU overload sound is a massive difference. More cores and big third party coolers is the way forward until Quantum computers arrive.

[whyterabbyt]

[quote="tony tony chopper"Those days when your new PC was 5x faster than the previous one 3 years before, are over (since 2008 I'd say).[/quote]

Those days never happened before 2008 either, if there was any kind of pricing parity included in this hypothesis. Maybe if your old PC cost you £20 and the new one cost you £20,000.

[fluffy_little_something]

Samples sound better and cause just a fraction of the CPU load compared to synths.

I wouldn't say that either, synths aren't static like samples. Besides, good resampling has a CPU cost as well (more than for a basic synth).

Good samples don't sound static. I am waiting for my general rompler to arrive. So far I have been using the cheap samples included with my DAW, even they sound better than synth emulations. But they do indeed sound static.

What is resampling?

I have modest demands because of the kind of music I want to make. Basically all I need is acoustic drums, various strings and brass sounds, punchy bass guitars, jazzy rhythm guitars, Rhodes and upright piano. Samples are way superior at delivering those sounds in an authentic way.

The few synth sounds I occasionally use, well, my existing SynthEdit stuff should be enough for that, especially the P80, which is by far the most versatile and best sounding of my plugins, and consumes little CPU I can use it for lush synth pads when real strings are inappropriate, but also for Moog synth basses and bells.

[tony tony chopper]

Those days never happened before 2008 either, if there was any kind of pricing parity included in this hypothesis. Maybe if your old PC cost you £20 and the new one cost you £20,000.

not at all, they all costed roughly the same, and they were all 3 to 5x faster after 3 years.

Are you saying that desktop CPU's evolution hasn't slown down?


an interesting article as it also talks about multithreading:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/11 ... ll-stuck/3

[tony tony chopper]

Who cares what the OS CPU meter says fact is it improves DAW performance a good sound vs a crackly CPU overload sound is a massive difference. More cores and big third party coolers is the way forward until Quantum computers arrive.

Ok, say you got 4 synths running in parallel (or voices in them, whatever), and you got, I don't know, a 200% speedup out of a quad core. If you don't understand where the speedup comes from, you may think that adding 4 more cores will bring another 200% speedup, but no, because you won't have enough to keep 8 cores busy.

Worse, if you had 1000 cores, context-switching for 1000's of threads *alone* would probably kill audio buffering, without processing anything.

[tony tony chopper]

I have modest demands because of the kind of music I want to make. Basically all I need is acoustic drums, various strings and brass sounds, punchy bass guitars, jazzy rhythm guitars, Rhodes and upright piano. Samples are way superior at delivering those sounds in an authentic way.

well obviously, for "real" instruments you want samples, but CPU is irrelevant, a sample of the real thing will always sound better.
(I assume we were talking about "electro" synths here)

[whyterabbyt]

Those days never happened before 2008 either, if there was any kind of pricing parity included in this hypothesis. Maybe if your old PC cost you £20 and the new one cost you £20,000.

not at all, they all costed roughly the same, and they were all 3 to 5x faster after 3 years.

Provide some details on that then so we can check historical benchmarks.

Are you saying that desktop CPU's evolution hasn't slown down?

Straw man. Im saying there was no point in time where PC CPU evolution meant that you got a 5x speed increase in a 3 year span.

[fluffy_little_something]

What's an electro synth? As opposed to?


As far as CPU's, I assume the development will slow down as more and more people switch to tablets, which I take it use different chips, not the standard Intel or AMD ones.
The biggest factor might be servers, but there the focus is more on energy efficiency and reliability, not on CPU performance, if I am not mistaken.

[robogone]

Im saying there was no point in time where PC CPU evolution meant that you got a 5x speed increase in a 3 year span.

A quick Google search shows that it's not anywhere close to that:



Looks more like it could have doubled over that period.

This shows MIPS, which is a good comparison across different numbers of cores.

[tony tony chopper]

Provide some details on that then so we can check historical benchmarks.

average these 2 before 2003 (see, I was generous as for when the slowdown occured), and add to this the apparition of SSE, you'll get more than 5x.
From 1997 to 2000, that's already 4x, add SSE and you're already over 10x. Unlike multiple cores, SSE was really meaningful for multimedia.

[tony tony chopper]

Im saying there was no point in time where PC CPU evolution meant that you got a 5x speed increase in a 3 year span.

A quick Google search shows that it's not anywhere close to that:

not close? Do you even know how to read a chart?

[fluffy_little_something]

The silicon-based chip technology has almost reached its physical potential, which probably is why things are gradually slowing down.
That's why they are working on other technologies, like quantum computers.

[rod_zero]

Well I just freeze and bounce early before mixing, it makes workflow faster and forces you to commit and stop tweaking.