'Ideal' Mac system specs for Repro 5 / Diva etc.

[aled.co]

Hi all.

I'm running Repro 5 in Ableton on a 2015 MacBook Pro (3.1GHz dual-core i7). Performance is good, but only if I limit myself to a single instance of Repro per song.

I'm trying to get a feel for the performance improvement I'd see from upgrading to a machine with more cores.

Ideally I'd like to be able to run two or three polyphonic instances of Repro 5 simultaneously. Is this realistic (or even possible) with the latest iMacs / MacBook Pros?

For those of you with newer Macs than mine, at what point does it all get too much for your CPU?

[Calenberger]

Have you activated multicore?

[aled.co]

Have you activated multicore?

Yep.

Just to be clear, I'm not complaining about the performance I'm getting. I just want to know what it's like to use these plugins on a more modern machine with way more cores than 2.

[Urs]

I have no experience with i7 dual cores, but I'd strongly recommend 4 or more cores. By far the majority of CPU issues with Diva were reported on dual cores, where the multicore support simply doesn't work that great.

That said, recent 6-core Mac minis and MBPs outperform my 2013 Mac "Dustbin" Pro with the same number of cores. It's crazy what you get these days compared to what it was 4 or 5 years ago.

[Urs]

Also, I'm using Inception-style techniques ("dreams") to convince my company to buy me a new Mac Pro with 16 cores once it's available... to me that seems to be the ultimate machine for running native plug-ins (very fast cores, and enough of them. The configurations with more cores have slower clock rates).

[aled.co]

Thank you Urs. I'm going to start saving for a machine with more cores.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Also, I'm using Inception-style techniques ("dreams") to convince my company to buy me a new Mac Pro with 16 cores once it's available... to me that seems to be the ultimate machine for running native plug-ins (very fast cores, and enough of them. The configurations with more cores have slower clock rates).

Good luck convincing the boss!

[Ploki]

For those of you with newer Macs than mine, at what point does it all get too much for your CPU?

I have a 6-core Mini, and I rarely come to a point that i have to freeze, so at least 10-15 instances i guess?
I think i tested diva and it was around 14 instances?

[Hanz Meyzer]

An Hackintosh. Setup a powerful standard component PC, for now Intel CPU only and AMD GPU only, then install macOS 10.13 onto it (10.15 works, too, but is not recommended for audio) using the recent clover efi bootloader. Commonly then it works OOTB. The best Mac you can get. Watch out non standard port or component solutions which require special mainboard vendor drivers, like Thunderbolt3 ports. It's possible to get Thunderbolt 3 working, too. Normally all standard connectors and components will work. You will find a lot of "success story builds" in the forums over there, which you then can simply follow step by step.

Imagine the benefits of this concept: Swap outdated components, fix defective drives , add RAM. Add additional drives. You even can add a pcie-firewire card to have firewire working. And then you have so many useful ports, USB3, HDMI, display port, audio in and out. Also much more powerful in processing usually, than a "real" mac. The sky is the limit now.

[Ploki]

Imagine the benefits of this concept: Swap outdated components, fix defective drives , add RAM. Add additional drives. You even can add a pcie-firewire card to have firewire working. And then you have so many useful ports, USB3, HDMI, display port, audio in and out. Also much more powerful in processing usually, than a "real" mac. The sky is the limit now.

Frankly, the most outdated component for me is usually the CPU, and i can add RAM and i did.
And as far as ports go, i wouldn't change my 4 thunderbolt ports for other ever. I'd rather drop HDMI and two USB3.0 ports i have for another one or two Thunderbolt3 ports.