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Old 12-04-2017, 07:51 PM
zion zion is offline
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Default Re: Mac Pro - higher Single Core Speed or more Cores

Quote:
Originally Posted by PowerofEight View Post
I have access to some pretty high-end hardware (how and why is not important) on the workstation and server level and I have conducted this experiment many, many times. I've tried all sorts of set ups, dual cpus, single cpu with high ghz count, single cpu high core count and lower ghz count.


More cores less ghz, or Less cores more ghz??? It all comes down to how the APPLICATION is utilizing multi-cores/multi-threads. It also comes down to how clean the coding of the application is and what technologies are being taken advantage of.

Actually, by the end of the week I'll be conducting the same experiment one more time since Windows Pro for Workstations now allows us to utilize 4 socket CPUs on the motherboard on the workstation level instead of needing a server OS.

When it comes down to it, although pro tools supports high multi-core setups, when rendering, sometimes I'll see 20% usage across all cores which tells me, the thread counts are splitting up but are not being utilized to the max for each core.

But if you have a 16 core / 32 thread xeon cpu at 2ghz /core vs a 6 core at 3.7ghz a core (i7-8700k) and 4.7ghz burst, I'm going to take the lesser core count at the faster speed to outperform it in pro tools. I'm not coding for pro tools, but it seems that pro tools performs better at faster core than high core/lower ghz. Again, I'm pretty sure this is code-related.

But if for example, you are using Vegas 15, or doing 3d or type of video encoding that utilizes ALL cores to their maximum (Vegas 15 absolutely does as it EXTREMELY CPU intensive) than multicore is the way to go.

I also have reason to believe given the freshness of AMD ryzen / threadripper, pro tools does not get even close to taking full advantage of these technologies despite the insane core /ghz count. (Vegas is a program that does seem to do so)

This is a subject actually take a lot of interest in, since I don't believe what I read and I have a coffee lake 8700k coming in this week to test and see how it handles the rendering process in pro tools and vegas.

I'll be testing a quad cpu vs dual cpu, vs single cpu (high ghz) vs single cpu (high core) etc etc.

Should make for some interesting results. My hypothesis is that the coffee lake will end up winning with its insane core speeds.

We will see...
This has been my experience as well. I’ve used Vegas Pro and you are correct it uses all Core to there max while Pro Tools works better with a medium rage multi ( 4 or 6 ) core with higher cpu clock speed. It would be nice to see Pro Tools advance to this level but it’s not likely to happen for a long long time.
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