I don’t think the question is dumb, a very valid point imo
I have found myself getting a little frustrated with my curent work in progress. I’m running Renoise on a pretty heavily overclocked Opteron 170 right now (as in signature), and like to run at a low enough latency so anything I do during live sets isn’t too affected, but there is also a point where latency makes little difference to CPU usage, and I seem to be coming closer to my current setup’s limits. I know a lot of people will say render to samples, and lower samplerate, but I am always tweaking the tunes, and am never settled with them, so I like to keep the original elements of it as much as possible without loosing quality, or flexibility, especially during sets.
So anyway, my point being - there’s another core, doing next-to-nothing, but that is my only niggle atm
Luckily, I’m moving over to my new rig, an E6300 & Asus P5B-Deluxe. This was frighteningly faster than my overclocked Opteron at stock speeds, and am currently testing at 2.8GHz on just a trickle over 1 volt, perhaps it will go lower!? This chip seems to also hit a 100% overclock quite happily, but my memory is my limiting factor at the moment.
Sorry, I’m just bragging now, but the potential of C2D must surely be realised
Of course we are working on this. We would be stupid if we would waste half or more of the power of nowadays computers. Just let us finish the release first, then come up with new stuff. Releasing this monster is really hard enough for now…
I’ve been using renoise on a Core Duo T2300 lappy for last 6-7 months.
its been superb , considering I only have 512MB ram and onboard sound card. Using manymany vsti,vst and effects at once.
The speed of the computer and the fact some OS tasks are propbably taken on by least used core makes a difference … I have noticed a HUGE inprovement from my s478 3.0E
Sorry Taktik, I’m aware you & the team will be slaving away for us on this, and I didn’t mean to aim that at you guys, (you are all of course, doing a superb, and very attentive job). To be honest, my quarms are probably down to me being inefficient with my tracking anyway!
I was just trying to make the point that C2Ds are unbeatable for their price/performance
thanks! this is good info. though we never minimize renoise during the set. the samples we were playing in the track weren’t terribly huge. i think in some cases they might might have been a rendered channel from one pattern, or actually now that i think about it, we do sometimes use these multi-sample instruments for horns or violins which have those big professional orchestral samples. anyway thanks again.
Also (we didn’t do this live, but we will eventually) we have been using the clock sync feature, so that one computer controls the other. there is some “straying” from perfect sync and it is noticeable at times, but it always manages to find it’s way back after a dozen ticks or so.
the new version of renoise is great, btw, thanks for all the hard work. we appreciate it very much and will continue to use it for all of our composing and live sets.
Anyway, so what I’m really curious about now is, will a E6600 clocked at 2400 and not using it’s 2 cores potentional to the fullest with Renoise, outperform my P4 without hyper threading clocked at 3200?
And is it worth the investment?.. I really want more CPU power for Renoise…
yeah that’s my problem, too. i’ve got P4 3.4@3.9GHz and still, it’s not enough (sometimes =). i’ve got many expectations in dual core processors but i won’t buy it now because i’m afraid it would handle even less VSTs… yet…
@nula
the pentium4’s rely on intel’s old and dusty netburst architecture with their long execution pipelines. they have a very inefficient instructions-per-clock ratio, especially compared to core2duos.
i switched from a p4 3.0@3.8 to an e6600 @2x 3.5ghz and it’s about three times as fast in renoise now, even though one of the cores is not being used for audio prcessing.
even at stock clocks, any core2duo would outperform your 3.9ghz p4 power plant.
neither nor.
pentiums are all outdated and the product name will die a slow marketing death.
athlons are inferiour to intel’s current line of core2duo CPUs.
so, as mentoned above, the Intel Core2Duo CPU is currently the best performing processor to get for any kind of application.
AMD’s available CPUs are all out of competition at the moment.
every operation a CPU has to execute is mathematical.
however athlons do feature more processing power for floating point operations than pentium4’s. but then again, core2duo’s feature more power on the FPU side than athlons do.
at the very moment it has never been so simple before to decide about what CPU to buy.
maybe AMD’s upcoming “barcelona” K10-Athlon will be able to bring back the performance crown again… but it’s still a long way until its release and there are no official benchmarks available yet for that quad-core CPU.
Remember that more power doesn’t mean better music, or even ‘good’ music + Don’t get to hung up on upgrading technical specs and the utopian quest for the ultimate computer, you can lose a good deal of yer life on that kind of shit while you’re better of tracking some music!
that’s almost a philosophical question you arouse here.
of course you can write great music on c-64 or with 96k of samples, but the more available resources you got, the less limited you are in what you want to achive musically.
if i was still writing stuff on an Pentium3, i’d probably end up freezing and bouncing tracks all day long as soon as i exceed 4 times polyphony with my favourite CPU hungry software synth.
workflow would suffer greatly, even though i could actually write the same song as i could on a faster machine - but with a way greater effort.
i am as most humans: lazy, preferring the easier way.
and as long as it is feasible, i choose “realtime” over “post-processed”.
Damnit keith, you got me into thinking of buying a faster PC again. On the other hand, I keep my composing more minimal now, knowing I don’t have unlimited CPU-power, so I guess something good comes out of it, in the end.
Still, one day I need to upgrade my lovely machine.
well it sounds like this thread, is in need of…
-i have a problem.
with these recommendations, I’m going to take this advice & get an E6600. from glimpsing my signature. trust, I’m in need of a monumental overhaul! i guess i haven’t exactly been keeping up.
i was partial to asus boards, crucial & mushkin memory & amd chips.
so now that i feel like i may be stepping over to greener grass,
is there any combinations that really make this chip glow?
if you plan to pick up a core2duo, hold on till the end of april, since intel is planning a rather aggressive price drop due the 22nd: http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=5086
chipsetwise, i am running the i975x (Asus P5WDH-deluxe) and can only recommend it if you’re not looking for FSBs beyond 420mhz or don’t plan overclocking at all.
the motherboard itself is not very picky concerning RAM, and again, if you don’t plan to overclock, any DDR2-533 will do, even though i’d recommend DDR2-667, to just have some headroom incase you might need it.
price difference is near to non-existant.
if you want to do some overclocking, DDR2-800 is recommended.
creme-dela-creme is cellshock memory at the moment.
i myself am running corsair ddr2-800 cl4 and cannot complain.
Thanks for reporting the current ‘hot deals’, keith. Last time I seriously considered buying a new computer was last autumn. Seems it’s a good idea to wait another couple of months then.
junoir, i’d wait for the next scheduled price drop (late april) and fetch up a C2D of choice. otherwise you might endup waiting forever, since when one technology is being released, the successor is already waiting right behind the next corner…
however it’s interesting to see, that with the Q6600 for a scheduled $266 later this year, quad-core will become mainstream.
imagine the possibilities with a CPU like that and a multithreading-capable renoise.
i kinda wonder if it would be plausible to,
have temporarily set renoise only use 1 core, thus allowing each core to be assigned to its own core. so those with dual or quad cores could run 2-4 instances of renoise at once, without them fighting for cycles?
