amd and intel are on their way to release dual core processors now, and as i am building a new system soon (mainly for the use of renoise) i would like to know:
is there any point in getting one of those cpus? can renoise take advantage of that at all?
For the current 1.5 version:
Would this answer be sufficient if i tell you that Renoise even shuts down the Hyperthreading driver on Hyperthreading CPU’s?
It works on a 64bit AMD cpu, but doesn’t benefits the advantage since it only uses the CPU in 32bit processing mode.
For the future:
Don’t know, this is up to the dev-team to consider if they can use the possibilities of such CPU power.
I may be wrong but i don’t think that 64 bit support would speed up renoise so much…
But of course it would be nice to have 64 bit support anyway… it will definaltely have some benefits… 
And by the way Gemini, I like your demo song “On My Mind” 
If you are that Gemini of course
When I ran Renoise on AMD 64bit my feeling was that it’s incredibly fast. Since I haven’t compared it to a similar Intel machine it really doesn’t count for much though… Ok, you often hear that 64 bit is pointless, since Windows is 32-bit, but I’ve read the AMD has a lot of other features which speeds up things.
About dual CPU’s, I’m not sure if a program like Renoise could be made to support both (?). It would be nice to lay out the VST’s on both CPU’s, which could speed up things a lot. My guess is that it’s not possible though.
Of course if you have other programs in the background the second CPU could help a bit. But that’s not really the case. When you make music, you make music, you don’t need to run a bunch of programs…
The vst plugin has to support dual cpu’s as well… and many do that.
At some point Renoise has to support this?
In two years time you can only buy multicore cpu’s anyway.
-pysj
true, but real dual processors are used in an more or less efficient way. the deal with HT is like this : 2 processors share the same base power, but the os does not know anything about it. now this situation :
graphics is assigned to cpu 1
sound is assigned to cpu 2
on a dual system its the way to go, on the ht system gui will steal cpu cycles from the virtual sound cpu, even if it has a lower priority - since the os decides to handle the both cpus equaly.
therefore we dont enable multithreading for HT - it causes more problems and performance gain (or lost) is marginal.
okay, so right now it’s a better idea to get a single core processor. that’s what i wanted to know 
well, dualcore processors should act like areal dual cpu system, so you will gain some performance.
This is pretty much true, and in a lot of cases you could assign one CPU for background processes and the other one for foreground processes or maybe in this current era, you can assign one CPU to graphical task handlings and the other one to memory and I/O handling and so forth, so you can devide your power in a better way and this would benefit the performance of Renoise in a way it is not being bothered by other processes snooping down CPU resources Renoise rather keeps for itself.
That’s also probably why Renoise runs smooth on a 64-bit AMD cpu.
The only things where Renoise may be able to benefit 64-bit power is when 64-bit samples are being implemented
sorry for revamping this old thread.
I’m an unhappy owner of a P4 3Ghz with HyperThreading.
This means that ReNoise uses only 50% of my CPU resources.
What’s terrible about this is that my motherboard (ASUS P4V800-X) does not allow disabling HT from its BIOS.
I got bored of this situation, so I’m thinking of getting a completely new AMD-based system, or getting a new motherboard which allows HT disabling.
Since the first option is of course much more expensive, I ask if someone has tried HT disabling, and what boost he got.
In particular: searching over Internet did not clarify if disabling HT will let me use 100% of a single CPU, or will just prevent the OS from using the other 50% of resources.
in the first case, I would just get a motherboard which can disable HT (any suggestion?).
have you tried to upgrade the latest bios firmware for your motherboard?
( http://support.asus.com ) maybe in it´s latest version this option becomes avaliable.
yes, I’ve tried:
the BIOS developement apparently has stopped at beta stage of version 1009.
Versions after the one I have built-in at buying time (1004) all make my system unstable.
However, they do not allow HT disabling.
I have some more news about this topic: looks like HT can also be disabled directly on Windows by specifying the /ONECPU option in the boot.ini file.
See this site for example.
This is not as performant as disabling HT via BIOS and reinstalling-repairing Windows, since the Windows Kernel will continue to be multiprocessor, but should be far better than like mine is now.
I will check this once I will go back home
HOORAY!!
it worked!
if you have similar conditions, or you just don’t want to reinstall-repair your Windows installation, just use the above tip (adding /ONECPU to boot.ini; you can also make a multiboot system with and without this option) and you will get great benefits!
I can say I’ve got about 75% more CPU available, and of course also rendering is much better!
I think I’m going to keep my present workstation for a long time
improvement to what’s written above:
changing Windows kernel to the single-processor one may increase general performances.
you can specify the kernel to be used by the /KERNEL option.
Make sure you copy the file ntoskrnl.exe from your Windows CD (I386 folder) or
C:/windows/ServicePackFiles/i386
to Windows’ System32 folder.
here it is a sample boot.ini file (it’s the one I use):
[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="XP without HT" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /ONECPU /kernel=ntoskrnl.exe
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="XP with HT" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
this configuration starts Windows without HT after 5 seconds during which the user is able to choose Windows with HT enabled.
That’s quite useful stuff. Might add that to the boot.ini for my audio partition, although to be honest I have been using it very little recently, just messing about with small ideas on my main partition while doing other things. No wonder I haven’t got anything done for ages.
i wonder from what point it will be just marketing hype and nothing really efficent… 
You can also attempt to create a specific Media-PE cd for your own crippled XP environment using as less resources as possible…
http://www.bootcd.us/
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
You have a few worries less:you don’t need to worry about your OS drive crashing and you have to reinstall everything from scratch.
Boot the CD and all is fine and you can compose.
Only when you change audio hardware, you may have to rebuild your CD using the new drivers.
guest:
until you don’t have problems, you won’t benefit at all; on the contrary, disabling HT causes some performance degradation with other applications (I’ve experienced higher loading time when opening more than one application at once, for example).
If you will get annoying glitches and similar issues, give my advices a try.
I’m gonna go for an Opteron 165, their overclocking potential, power consumption, and temperature tolerance (around +10°C) are better than Athlons, albeit a slightly more expensive option, their reliability is second to none due to the better quality silicon used, although it seems intel have stepped it up a notch with the following:
I’m not one to jump on the anti-intel amd fanboy wagon ( I really like intel’s pentium m chips), but I hope that new xeon proc isn’t another hacked together dual- I think it was smart of amd to build their’s from the ground up. The opteron 165 is nice, but if you want a higher multiplier for OC’ing I would at least step up to a 170- (although it may not be worth the extra hundred bucks for such a small performance gain). If you do get into the 165, make sure to pick up an OEM proc from somewhere like newegg, I copped one recently ( a 170) and got lucky and got an early production proc with better stepping.
I hope I’m not mentioning anything you allready know though…