Intel P4 vs. XEON

[[KGB]]

First let me say i called digidesign first one this and found out 2 things. 1) digidesign support is only available for 90 freakin days, 1 year for hardware repair. 2) they do not do any testing or benchmarks for system performance. so with that in mind i have 2 questions now the first being i have been looking to upgrade my processor and was wondering if anyone knows if there is any performace benifets from the XEON as apossed to the P4. obviously for workstations and multiprocessing and hyper-threading there is but PT doesnt support these. my second question is MP or MultiProcessing isnt "supported" by digi. does this mean it doesnt or wont work, or are they to lazy to see if it will? does anyone have a dual processor machine running PT? if so is it utilizing the second processor?

[BesnikB]

I had a dual processor compaq workstation old one SP700. it's a dual P3 Xeon on 550mhz, 1 gb ram etc...
PTLE 5.3.2. worked perfectly on it. much better than on my other P3 that I had at that time that had the same speed 550mhz.
Ofcourse I had to do the standard computer on windows xp, but i worked good. No problems.
PEACE

[[KGB]]

I had to do the standard computer on windows xp, but i worked good. No problems.

why is that? XP supports multipule processors just fine. thats actually what its designed for.

[xeetstreet]

Only XP Pro supports dual procs, and I don't think that it's supported by Digidesign.

[Chris Cavell]

XP Pro supports dual processors. Xeons are listed as compatible. While digi admits to not having completely tested dual-cpu systems on the PC side, they are supported, but not guaranteed. It uses dual cpu's in an "untraditional" manner. PT doesn't make use of multi-threading...but rather allows you to set the cpu usage so high as to effectively dedicate one of the processors entirely to PT...the other remaining for the system and anything else running like softsynths and rewired devices, etc...

[[KGB]]

It uses dual cpu's in an "untraditional" manner. PT doesn't make use of multi-threading...but rather allows you to set the cpu usage so high as to effectively dedicate one of the processors entirely to PT...

This sounds as if your talking about asymmetric processing, where in one app. say an OS can be dedicated to one processor while another, say PT is dedicated to the other. if this is true im curiuos to see this in action because Win XP is nativly uses SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing). meaning it spreads the processing work across both CPU's equally, simialerly to Load Balancing, effectavly giving you "multi-tasking" capabilities. when you say you can "set the cpu usage so high" im asuming you are refuring to the DAE Setup? if anyone is using this practicly i would really like to chat and get an answer to to see if its worth the effort to jump to 2 CPU's

[Chris Cavell]

You will see the cpu usage setting offer values up to 99% on a dual cpu machine where on a single cpu machine it only goes up to 85% (because it NEEDS to reserve some for the system). Unfortunately, I can't really answer for XP, but I currently use a dual G4 this way to supplement my aging mix + tdm system with a hell of a lot more RTAS power. In LE, the results so far have shown little boost in performance over a single CPU at 85%. In the end the performance boost probably isn't worth the difference in price for putting it together.

[Chris Cavell]

Also, I thought I might point out, the P4 does not support SMP...but the xeon does...if you go dual with intel, you have to go xeon. Most (maybe all) current AMD chips support SMP, so you may be better off going AMD here...but like was stated earlier, PT doesn't utilize SMP anyway.