Mac Pro 2009 and 2008 questions

[thegun]

Hi there,

I'm currently wondering about which Mac Pro 2009, or 2008 to get and have been reading the forums and checking benchmark scores in order to make my decision. Unfortunately most benchmarks are geared toward the visual arts, i.e. either photoshop, 3D studio or video editing software. So I have been compiling info from different sources but am still not clear on a few subjects.

First, reading the forums I have learned that Logic Pro uses all 8 cores of a Mac Pro but I haven't found any information about whether Pro Tools does that as well. Does anyone have information on this?

Second, I saw a graph on one of the forums where Logic Pro ran faster on the 2008 machines than on the 2009 machines. Anyone see this as well? I have seen other tests where the 2009 machines are faster than the 2008 in both single and multithreaded apps so this was a surprise to me.

Third, I have noticed that people who have a 2009 Mac Pro have had to turn 'Multithreading' off for Pro Tools to work. Will this not nullify the effects of Snow Leopard which is supposed to make use and boost multithread performance? Is there any hints to whether Pro Tools is going to take advantage of Multithreading in the future?

Any thoughts on this are appreciated.

[rbenzon]

I echo your concerns, thegun.

My early 2009 Mac Pro is barely a month old. And naturally, I am looking forward to Snow Leopard, which will hopefully utilize my 8-core Nehalem optimally. I plan on moving up to Snow Leopard as soon as it is released, regardless of Avid's support for it.

Presumably, Logic Studio will benefit from Snow Leopard's Grand Central feature. So I may switch to Logic Studio, at least until Avid upgrades PT8 to exploit Snow Leopard's performance enhancers. Of course, I don't expect many to switch, since PT is their lifeblood, hence, is more important than an OS upgrade.

But if Grand Central can somehow enhance performance of the current PT8, then even better.

Just the same, it would be nice to hear Avid's plans for Snow Leopard support.

[lwilliam]

Don't expect the support to be quick for Snow Leopard. I think it took over a year to get Leopard support.

Do a search here for Nehalem or similar. There are several recent threads from new Mac owners. None of them here mentioned turning off hyperthreading. Most seem quite impressed with the performance and no one has said PT doesn't recognize all the cores; in fact, on the high-end Nehalem, it apparently shows 16 cores to PT.

However, the 2008 8-cores are solid machines with Protools.

[thegun]

Looks like there are some conflicting reports about the Hyperthreading. Some people are turning it off, some are reporting all 16 cores active.

I echo you on Snow Leopard. It did take a very large amount of time for Leopard to get supported.

Looks like Nehalem is running well though on many machines. It´s a difficult one. Take the plunge now or wait till they iron out the Snow Leopard kinks and by then they might have upgraded the Mac line with a processor bump and faster memory (1333). But that could be a year from now.

[ajastudios]

Nehalem is qualified and rocking solid!

[jasion4]

new 8 core running fine - yes it does show as 16 'virtual' cores - seemed to get best/most stable performance with 128 sample latency and 7 RTAS processors set to 99% - oddly, higher buffer sizes seemed to cause worse cpu performance.

[thegun]

yes that is odd!

and I have read before that having one less core than you actually have assigned to PT, like you do, is the way to go.

Seems like it´s running pretty well so I think I am going to take the plunge with a student discount. Am currently on a MacBokk Pro 2.16 GHZ core duo, with 2 G RAM maxed out. So I´m definitely going to feel a big boost here.

[CME]

Originally Posted by thegun

.....and I have read before that having one less core than you actually have assigned to PT, like you do, is the way to go...

From what I've read some plug-ins (especially VI's) use non-real time code. This is what gives PT the most problems. So when you leave one processor "free" it is utilized for this non-real time code and also any OS or other processes going on. I have no idea about the less performance at higher buffer settings though.

[thegun]

Thanks for the info CME. I'll be using NI Kontakt on the system so that's good to know.

[j24keys]

The 2.26 Mac Pro SCREAMS. Apple explains how to take full advantage of the current mutlicore capabilities: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3161


I've been using for a few days now and truly appreciate it. I even have some drives connected via LAN which IS faster than FireWire drives. Even the FireWire 800 is slower than a Gigabit LAN (I use Airport Extreme as hub). I get transfer speeds up of approx 940MB/s. This allows me to use the same array of drives with all my macs in the studio.