parts shopping / DAW can only use a single cpu core at a time?!?!

guitz

Member
I read somewhere that having a cpu with multiple cores is all but useless for most of the things your DAW will be doing like recording tracks and adding software FX and instruments.....This seemed odd to me, then I remember seeing my older Intel i5's 4 cores displayed in Cakewalk SONAR and now remember that only the first core would show the vast vast majority of activity....This kind of stunned me a bit but I never really thought about it, but apparently the modern typical DAW cannot make use of parallel processing that has to occur to take advantage of multiple cores working simultaneously. It works great for other software programs apparently, like video rendering and graphics programs, games, etc, but for DAW use, it's that first , single core that is doing 95% of the work.......which comes to the next question,...what kind of CPU is everyone using? I'm looking at re-building my entire pc after damaging the motherboard cpu socket when I got too much CPU paste gooped up everwhere and bent a bunch of the pins, DOH! .....Anyway, here's what I'm considering:

AMD Ryzen 2700X, 8 core @ 3.4 ghz per core
AMD Asus Rog Strix 450-F mobo
16 gig DDR 4 memory
a video card that will also let me play a modern game occasionally, tho I am not a gamer by any stretch lol
maybe a new snazzy case of some kind that will still let me mount my multi-sized card reader in a front slot
 
I use an Intel i7 CPU and Reaper uses all cores.

My laptop has an Intel i5 CPU and Reaper uses all its four cores
 
Agreed, Reaper definitely makes use of all cores. It spreads the load nicely.

My recommendation, if you've got the option, would be to go for the 3rd gen Ryzen 7. The 2700 is still an excellent chip, but the 3700 has enough of a performance gain to be worth looking at. Just make sure that the BIOS on your motherboard is updated to a version that supports 3rd gen Ryzen before installing, since you're using a 400 series mobo. Either that or find a 500 series mobo if you do end up getting a 3700.

I just ordered a Ryzen 9 3900X to replace my Ryzen 7 1700, I'm very excited about it. It's gonna be an audio/video editing beast :)
 
Wow this is interesting to hear ....maybe it was a limitation of Cakewalk Sonar for using all cores...I'll see if I can find the video where I got the info from and post it in here....
 
Agreed, Reaper definitely makes use of all cores. It spreads the load nicely.

My recommendation, if you've got the option, would be to go for the 3rd gen Ryzen 7. The 2700 is still an excellent chip, but the 3700 has enough of a performance gain to be worth looking at. Just make sure that the BIOS on your motherboard is updated to a version that supports 3rd gen Ryzen before installing, since you're using a 400 series mobo. Either that or find a 500 series mobo if you do end up getting a 3700.

I just ordered a Ryzen 9 3900X to replace my Ryzen 7 1700, I'm very excited about it. It's gonna be an audio/video editing beast :)


Its actually the 2700X , ..is the gain from the 3700 pure CPU core speed? I ask because quite honestly, even my ancient Intel i5 quad core at 2.667 ghz worked beautifully for even heavy track load songs with a fair amount of plug in FX and soft synth drums, keyboards etc, so I'm inferring pretty much any modern day CPU at pretty much any clock speed will cut the mustard....
 
disclaimer, I did not view the complete video. But I saw enough to give some thoughts.

I'm not an authority on application architecture; hell, I had to do a spell check the word 'authority'. :) But I am curious what is the source of his information. Is he credible?

He mentions the serial processing, then goes on to demonstrate with a VSTi and a plug or two, saying one is required before the other and therefore only one core can handle the processing. I didn't get far enough into the video to see if expands out to more tracks and instruments. But I would think in a multi-track environment, the processes and threads can be doled out to multiple cores simultaneously. I don't truly believe the argument that serial processing has to be done on only one core.

As an example, the VSTi plug (Synth) uses one core to generate the sound, then it has to go through a compressor plug. That compressor plug could very well run on a different core. Why does it need to be the same? The maybe an EQ plug is next, etc.... I'm not saying he is wrong, but I don't buy his reasoning.

As I said earlier, Cubase takes advantage of multi-core processing and it is switchable, so, I switched it off and ran one of my songs. It didn't seem to make any difference in processor load. Neither in Task Manager, nor with the performance monitor in Cubase. I will say that most of my tracks are recorded audio with low resource consuming plugs; EQ, compressor, gates, etc. I use one instance of reverb. There are some VSTi that can consume a lot of cpu resources. If your brand of music runs cpu intensive VSTi's then you'll have to look at a beefy PC. If you're doing more audio recording, then you don't need a lot.

The one thing the guy said about audio being way more demanding than video is dead wrong. Audio uses probably about 1/3 of the processing power that video requires. That is based on my experience. And because he made that claim, it makes him less credible to me, which in turn makes the rest of his claims suspect.

Those are my thoughts... Hey, you asked.
:)
 
After going through his whole spiel about only utilizing one core, he shows the CPU usage with his system and there are all 4 cores running similar usage numbers. That seems to blow up his argument.
 
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As I said earlier, Cubase takes advantage of multi-core processing and it is switchable, so, I switched it off and ran one of my songs. It didn't seem to make any difference in processor load.


I wonder if that could be an indicator that maybe it really doesn't use all the cores for certain things...anyway, for me doing the 'one man band' thing, I always have soft synth drums and some keyboard or synth tracks going plus, whatever FX I may be using, so maybe he's referring to the cpu processing all that stuff in a serial way, hence a single core, as opposed to parallel processing and using multiple cores....otoh, you say Cubase will let you assign cores, that's cool...SONAR doesn't allow as far as I know but as I mentioned no matter what project I have going, the first CPU core meter shows pretty much ALL the activity so who knows lol
 
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