Processor shootout

  • Thread starter Thread starter ola
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ola

ola

Newbie
Normally, I would have made a search for this but as searching is disabled, I hope someone could repost the pros and cons on various available processors. Mainly, PIII, Celeron PPGA (not CeleronII, the don't work in dual setups) and Athlon K7 (or perhaps even K6-2 if they're any good). I've searched the net but all benchmarks and reviews are QuakeII oriented so I figured that they mean less to me who's obvioulsy building a DAW.

I'll be running n-Track under NT4.0WS or W2k(hopefully on a dual processor machine) and am thus in need of good floating point decimal calculation support. When it comes to floating points, Pentium is usually recommendsd but I've read in severa places that K7 are even better at this. Is this discussion like PC vs. Mac or can someone point me to some credible proof of which is better?

Thanks alot

/Ola
 
If you're actually concerned about dual processors then the K7 is not for you...yet. Unless I've missed an important headline, the Athlon chipsets are not yet supporting multiple processors.

Actually game benchmarks are good indicators of what you can expect (when comparing processors alone, not video cards). You're doing realtime precision processing on a "random" data set therefore FPU performance is critical...CPU cache is utilized to a much lesser degree etc.

The Athlon is a great processor and is faster than the PIII...however, they're both really damn expensive considering the fact that Celerons are still dirt cheap and offer plenty of performance for the average DAW.

Slackmaster 2000
 
If I understood what I thought I read somewhere correctly (?), to make use of dual processors one must use a multi-threaded-capable OS, and the software must be designed to use multiple threads of execution... Hopefully someone with a little more knowledge can step in here and clarify this.
 
The OS has to be more than multithread capable, it has to be dual-processor capable. Windows 9x is only multithread capable. NT is dual processor capable. Also, as ALChuck says, the software has to be specifically written to take advantage of parallel processing. I don't know of any hard disk recording software that has this capability. I'm not familiar with n-Track, though. But if it did have this capability, they wouldn't be keeping it a secret. It would be a big selling point. Designing such a program would be harder than a single-process version.

But two processors may come in handy for other things you use the computer for. Also, you may be running other music programs at the same time. For example, you might run Gigasampler with n-Trank. Though I'm not sure if NT would assign the two programs to seperate processors.
 
Those guys at Microsoft aren't as dumb as you think. You don't have to do anything special to distribute threads over mutliple processors in NT. Any application that makes good use of threads will benefit from multiple processors.

In the old days things were different...and some companies still like to confuse the public by implying that their software does something "special" to work with multiple processors.

Slackmaster 2000

[This message has been edited by Slackmaster2K (edited 05-20-2000).]
 
No ring-0 DMA timer support exists in NT. It is part of the security spec. that they allowed to be overidden for video in NT 3, but froze the audio portion back in 1995.

If you run NT, you are running 5 year old audio code that cannot be changed to access any primary buffers or reverb chips based on the NT OS spec.

It is a low-performance business OS. You dont write high quality performance software in this envoronment, for games or audio.
If you need a 10 Meg TCP stack or want to render a trillion polygons, great.

Don't try to to things the OS has been specifically hobbled not to do.

-- *
 
...pros and cons on various available processors...

Note: To record in CD Quality (44khz, 16 bit, Stereo) all you need is a 486 dx2 66mhz chip. (That came out around 7 years ago, old news)
 
Harntrox.

Why are all the high quality DAW's in bigger studio using PC NT based then?

Maybe me and Slackmaster are missing something here, but we have both found that NT is a much better OS for audio based software. Sure, a few limitations that you don't have with 9X OS's, but much more stable.

I am interested in you comment made "low performance business OS". Not what I hear from many IS managers....

Ed
 
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