Yea well on another forum someone sent me an LPX project to test diva on my 5,1. It was able to play at least one more track then the 16 core nMP according to what he reported. So yea something is definitely amiss, the nMP should have slayed my 5,1.
My 5,1 doesn’t have AVX at all. I don’t agree with the AVX related theories floating around unless we hear it directly from Urs’ mouth. That is pure speculation by the gearslutz crowd trying to guess at it.
but yea there is definitely something amiss.
we need to see more tests with another equally cpu hungry plugin And other standardized situations.
Fascinating. Using Cubase, my Intel 4790k hackintosh can do about 32 instances of Omnisphere with the same per-track processing. Only difference is the reverb (I dont have the 2C Audio B2 so used Liquidsonics Reverberate instead).
My opinion at the moment is that Xeon is throttling down the clock speed as more cores are utilized more. This is probably due to the fact that more power is needed when more cores are hitting higher levels of utilization. Also more heat produced. In any case, super cpu intensive plugins would start to suffer if and when the clock speed goes down. Having more cores is only helpful when you can spread the work load out to many threads, but a heavy plugin is heavy on one thread and needs the clock speed.
So basically when you have a few tracks going, fine...clock speed is fine, but as you add tracks, which adds threads, and multi-core utilization starts to increase...then the clock speed starts to drop and eventually a heavy cpu plugin like Diva will start to crap out.. whereas other plugins that are not as intensive on the CPU can still make it through and allow more and more threads to be created, utilizing more and more cores.
The i7 and i9 appear to not be throttling down the clock speed, rather the opposite...they start from a low idle clock speed and throttle it up as load increases.
The iMP and MP appears to behave as if Apple disabled the C-state/SpeedStep stuff in the EFI and the clock speed is managed by the OS to presumably hit some desired power target. It does not appear to be driven by actual temperature. The question is why Apple seems to be so conservative given the thermal capacity of the 2019 MP.
The laptops behave like all the Intel speed-fiddling is turned on. The clock is low under light load to keep temps down and preserve battery and only ramps up as the load increases and more horsepower is required. It also seems to be actually using the temp as well, unlike the Xeon machines.
That’s not going to happen as it would imply a serious design flaw that we would know about by now as there are billions of Intel CPUs that use on chip performance management.Temps are a result of more power being used. The nMP has better temperature control then most laptops to be sure so it should be able to handle higher temps, but power is also a factor. if the machine starts to use more and more power, not only will the temps go up, but at some point the power-starved cores will start to produce errors.
Exactly.
I wasn't meaning to imply that MacPros are going to produce errors, I was speaking hypothetically about what WOULD happen if CPU clock speed management was not in place to throttle down the CPU clock speed under load.
That is why, by design the macpros have to slow down the clock speed as core utilization goes up. It is that way by design to prevent errors as well as overheating. It is a physical constraint of the hardware that 16 cores can’t run full tilt.
unfortunately that it’s also one reason why this architecture is not great for digital audio.
If you are questioning my assertion that CPUs can produce errors when starved of power, then do a little research about overclocking. That is exactly what happens. The system is calibrated to run within limits where that won’t happen. When you push the system it will happen. It will either overheat from all the power use or crash from not enough power. If the macpro did not throttle the cpu clock speed down while increasing core utilization it could cause one or the other to happen.
And this throttling down has already been measured and observed by Xeon-w users
Ah, you were talking about over-clocking without clarifying that which is why I was scratching my head.Exactly.
I wasn't meaning to imply that MacPros are going to produce errors, I was speaking hypothetically about what WOULD happen if CPU clock speed management was not in place to throttle down the CPU clock speed under load.
That is why, by design the macpros have to slow down the clock speed as core utilization goes up. It is that way by design to prevent errors as well as overheating. It is a physical constraint of the hardware that 16 cores can’t run full tilt.
unfortunately that it’s also one reason why this architecture is not great for digital audio.
If you are questioning my assertion that CPUs can produce errors when starved of power, then do a little research about overclocking. That is exactly what happens. The system is calibrated to run within limits where that won’t happen. When you push the system it will happen. It will either overheat from all the power use or crash from not enough power. If the macpro did not throttle the cpu clock speed down while increasing core utilization it could cause one or the other to happen.
And this throttling down has already been measured and observed by Xeon-w users
The Mac Pro is not overclocked, so unless you think the system is unable to supply the correct voltage/amps to the CPU, highly unlikely, the only reason for it to not hit the maximum turbo speeds is down to inadequate cooling or Apple not allowing it for other reasons.I was trying to respond to the comments from others about why its not ONLY about temperature. Try to keep up.
Pretty much ALL Intel CPUs these days have different maximum turbo boost speeds based on the number of core loaded; those with more cores will see a bigger gap between the turbo boost speedsThe Xeon-W appears to turn the clock speed DOWN as core utilization is increased.