Hello good people. I'm thinking of buying a new desktop PC. inevitably it will have to be at least dual core. I'm wondering if I can expect to lose some CPU power as AM won't utilise both cores. That said CPU's are much more efficient now during the instruction cycle. so my real question is whether there are any AM users out there who have noticed a marked improvement since going to a dual core CPU ?
(Currently running an Intel single core 3.4 GHZ CPU on XP).
There are a lot of variables here. Each core is pretty much like a CPU, so in principle you will not loose power if you switch to a dual core machine at the same clock speed. This is of course, a gross generalisation because every CPU works differently. Some have more, less powerful cores, on the other hand, newer core designs are usually more efficient at the same clock speed than the previous generation.
In general you want one core dedicated to running your GUI and other system level operations and then the rest of your cores for audio. So switching to a dual core system should be an overall performance improvement compared to a single core anyway (your current single core has to handle the GUI, OS tasks *and* do all the audio). This does make your question completely valid for a quad-core use case.
AudioMulch will eventually support multicore audio execution. But I'm not sure it will yield the kind of boost you expect. It is well understood that adding cores to many tasks will not create linear improvements in performance (this is known as Amdahl's Law) . Depending on what your AudioMulch patch looks like, in the extreme adding a core could add absolutely no performance benefit (e.g. a patch where there are no parallel paths).
Thanks for the reply Ross. I am really enjoying using the program, though I am using a lot of VST's, which is eventually maxing out my single 3.4Ghz CPU . I should be really rendering a lot of the VST outputs to files and working with the loops to save on CPU. But I am having so much fun using sugarbytes thesys with AM that I don't want to lose the flexibility in that workflow. I was just fishing for user experiences with the newer dual/quad core Win7 type PC's with my post and wondered if there was a noticeable gain in terms of performance over older single CPU types. Not sure whether to invest in a second hand fast single CPU PC ie. > 3Ghz. Or whether to buy into a dual core setup. Word on your quad core advice and Amdahls theorem.