Hey guys…
I’m planning of spending a wildly generous amount of money on a new computer, dual core (Pentium D 830) with 2gb DDR2 machine. I was wondering how this change will affect Renoise in terms of performence? Is it “dual core ready”? Will my VST’s run better? Will a single core processor perform better because of the higher clock speed?
Thanks for any reply.
as far as i know:
-renoise dont support dual core CPU or dual CPUs.
-intel dual core CPU will perform worse in single threaded applications like renoise than top of the line intel single core CPU cause they are slower GHz
on the other hand dual core can improve single core apps stability/performance in that way that OS can run on and use recources of one core and renoise of the other core.
EDIT: Actually i would go for AMD dual core but because they are so expencive i will buid my comp using AMD single core, with option to upgrade it later to dual core.
AMD’s Athlon64 CPUs (“venice” or “san diego” core recommended) are currently the best choice for high renoise performance.
as long as no SSE is involved (which most commonly isn’t with rns/vst(i)), they have the superior FPU and therefore superior performance.
get the highest clocked “san diego” based A64 there is, the 4000+ (2,4Ghz) for around 360 - 400,- EUR, or if you have the money, the A64 FX-55 (2,6Ghz) for a whoopin’ 800,- EUR.
i’m on a hyperthreading CPU since quite a while, and the second virtual CPU gets even disabled by renoise on default, because it causes problems with some VSTi if enabled.
so i think it will definately take a while until dual/multi-core CPUs get supported by renoise.
i was also thinking about selling my P4 3,8Ghz Northwood but i then realized, there hardly is anything faster at the moment (single-core wise).
Thank you both, guys… you’ve been great help! 
Do any of you know of a place (Tom’s HW doesn’t have it) that compares Intel and AMD’s dual core CPUs?
Despite what my previous post may suggest, I don’t get the chance to spend that much money on a new machine that often. So I want to make this one count. Renoise is definitely a consideration but not the only one, dual core is a must mainly for its definit advantage in multitasking.
Thanks again.
here is good article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050603/
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050509/index.html
I would think Renoise may not support dual CPU, you can however split both cpu’s, one to do the foreground application performing and one to do the background application performance.
In this case cpu’s will load balance their powers across Renoise and it’s VST Instruments & effects.
are you sure its possible? i think that renoise and all vsts within renoise have to use same core…
half true. Renoise does not support Hyperthreading but it does support real dual cpu setups- although the performance gain is not that big.I am not sure how Renoise will perform out of the box on a dual core cpu. I presume that a dual core cpu will be visible as 2 physical and real (not like hyperthreading) processors to the operating system. If this is true, Renoise will offload certain tasks (like the graphic routines) to the secondary cpu.
that depends on wheather renoise is a thread-enabled application. especially in the case of vst which are basically applications of their own. if renoise launches separate threads to handle vsts (very likely) then the processing load would be distributed based on whatever symmetric multiprocessing (smp) approach the native os uses (ie: round robin, load based). if what pulsar says about the graphic routines being launched as a forked process, then that’s pretty neat. makes me want a second cpu… 
on a vaguely related note (and in no way related to my bitching and moaning about a linux port 
):
i’m not sure about the 2.6 series kernels, but i know from working with hyperthreaded xeons at work that 2.4 series kernels see hyperthreaded processors as 2 separate cpus. i wonder if that means renoise would run better on a hyperthreaded linux system than windows. 
Thanks trackit…
It’s seems quite clear that both price and performance go Intel’s way, even with the announcement of the cheaper AMD falvor. Power consumption with AMD is better but they distinctively say that future applications will favor the Intel platform mainly for its HT technology. Intel it is, then.
Thank you all so much.
price yes, but performance i’m not so sure… eariler articles that i have read said that AMD dual core have much better performance than Intel.
of course those aplications that can take advantage of intels HT technology are more in intles favor
unfortunately not, right now the vst intruments run inside the audio thread. Perhaps taktik can tell you more details here, from what i understand, it might be possible to have 2 vst hosts in renoise. Each one of them could be assigned to a specific cpu, but i have no idea if such construct is possible. The problem here is most likely the real time process / thread communication and data exchange.
ummm… no…
even conceptually the amd approach to processor design is much more performance-centric. amd put’s the memory controller directly on the die, and in dual core systems the two cores actually have a communication pathway that’s etched onto the chip, whereas intel has to do all of this stuff on the frontside bus. in other words, intel processors are bottlenecked for speed by the system-board’ fsb (which really really bites on laptops). that’s hardly a better design approach for performance. a 3.0ghz xeon doesn’t do you a whole lot of good if your memory access is throttled back to 400mhz. that’s just 2.6ghz of cycles where the cpu is twiddling it’s thumbs waiting for news from ram-country. amd’s revision of memory access technologies in cpus around the time that athlons came out officially marked the end of being able to gauge processor performance by Hz.