I have an Eee Pc (1000H) with the following specs:
1.6 GHz Intel Atom
2GB RAM
160GB HDD
Fedora 10 (Linux)
GNOME
Using ALSA
Still it reaches 100% CPU within about a minute.
Any ideas why and suggestions to make Renoise work?
Any help and info is much appreciated.
are you using it on battery power? if so, disabling the CPU Frequency manager should help (at cost of more battery usage, of course).
also, try raising ALSA buffer size.
I don’t know about Linux much, but my Samsung NC10 had about the same specs.
Even if you managed to get the performance to the max you can doodle around with samples, but with the atom you will be glad if you can run one VSTi without cracles.
Oh. I’ll try that later tonight. Thanks. 
I ran renoise on a 1ghz machine running XP with only slight bottleneck… a 1.6ghz with 2gb ram should have no issues.
Until I get a more powerful computer I hope to at least be able to make some really simple dnb tunes and beats. Nothing fancy. Hopefully I’ll get it running smoother.
That gives me even more hope. The sound is kind of stuttering and CPU hits 100%. I will hopefully figure it out with the help from your advise.
It’s an ATOM with a laptop hardrive/ram. i.e., it’s not very useful to be able to compare clock speeds directly. Still, I don’t imagine it can be that bad. Are you runnnig the RT kernel and all that?
Please, do the world a favor and stop mindlessly listening to marketting bullshit. You know not of what you speak.
To the original poster:
The probable culprit:
Your model includes “…what Asus is called Super Hybrid Engine technology, which despite sounding like it’s a component out of the Toyota Prius is actually an underclocking tool that allows users to ‘adjust CPU frequency, voltage and LCD brightness to minimise system noise and power consumption to save up to 15 per cent power consumption, or to maximise system performance according to individual needs’”
So basically, chances are, your SHE settings need to be changed.
Well the desktop system I refer to is 8 years old, so I’d be amazed if the EEE doesn’t have equivilant or higher bus speed.
Ok… Does the Atom have about half the bus size then?.. those results confuse me greatly… they go against my knowledge of computer archetecture.
Clockrate is clockrate, and MIPS are MIPS, but the two things aren’t equals. Let’s take a simple add instruction on each processor. On one it takes 4 cycles, on another it takes 2. Therefore, at 20hz, we can get 5 adds per second on one machine and 10 on another.
I have an EEE. It has a solid sate hard drive. His doesn’t though, and the HDDs in laptops, EEE’s included, are usually quite slow compared to a “proper” PC. I’m not aware of how much Renoise uses the disc, but some of the VSTi I use like to chug to and from it, and as you mentioned all the swapping out and in will have an impact. Crap harddrives are one of the major factors for why most people “feel” that a laptop is slow. They change to another program and have to wait 10 years for the damn thing to page fully in 
It’s a similar thing to the cycles-per-second issue. I don’t know the specs of an Atom vs a Pentium 4 in this regard, but I’d imagine the Atom’s memory interface wasn’t as fancy nor as fast.
I’ll give my university back my degree in Computer Engineering then. Having designed and synthesized my own CPU and memory interface, I’d like to imagine I have a small idea of whatthey do, even if the one I designed was a Z80 equivilent. Out of the two of us, you’ve shown yourself to be the one who’s swayed by the marketing bullshit. Just because they say it’s bignumberHz, doesn’t meant it will perform like something else you’ve used that’s bignumberHz
that’s definately not your fault or a malconfigured system.
it might be very unfortunate to hear so for you, but your EEE PC will probably only suffice for simple sample based renoising without using any (or only very few) VST and internal effects.
but then again… those atom based CPUs are not meant for multimedia labour anyways… so you’re actually raping it with renoise 
for comparison’s sake, here are some SuperPi 1M test results of equally or at least similarly clocked CPUs.
4.10 Ghz Q9550 - 011.75 sec - PC in my Sig;)
1.66 Ghz Core Duo - 036.51 sec - Toshiba Tecra A6
1.60 Ghz Core Duo - 037.25 sec - IBM Thinkpad x60
1.60 Ghz Pentium M - 048.00 sec - Toshiba Sat m45
1.40 Ghz Pentium M - 063.30 sec - Toshiba Tecra M2
1.50 Ghz Celeron M - 067.40 sec - Toshiba Sat M45
1.00 Ghz CeleronM353ULV - 083.06 sec - Asus 701 - 990Mhz
1,60 GHz Atom (Slvrth.) - 108.00 sec - Your fav. Netbook <<================ YOU ARE HERE
1.40 Ghz P4 Williamette - 136.00 sec - Dell 8100 Rambus pc
1.50 Ghz VIA C7-D - 341.31 sec - VIA VB7002G
233 Mhz Pentium MMX - 504.57 sec - Chaintech i440LX
*note: superpi is a single-threaded application.
so referring to these results, the atom is even slower than half the performance of a equally clocked pentium m. but it still beats the worst p4 ever: the willamette with 1.4 Ghz.
Well I have to say, my comp sci education is much more software based… and much less hardware based. I was under the impression that (for instance) systems with 32bit processors have 32bit busses that operate at the same clockrate as the processor… therefore the data throughput would be (relatively) the same for all processors of the same rate. Could you explain briefly what spec of the archetecture it is that would double/halve the data throughput?
I couldn’t point to one thing and say “that makes it perform slower”.
The Atom is aimed to be low power. There’s load of ways of doing this, and I have no idea how the Atom does it in this case. But one of the major ways is by stripping out the really “high performance” bits of the silicon like really fancy instruction-reordering and other “non essential” things. Then, for the Atom, they stick lots of the normal peripheral chips, like north and south bridges and all that, on the same silicon to reduce the amount of power needed to talk to them (which is quite a lot). Because of all these power saving techiniques, lots of “brute force” is lost.
I’m afraid to say my knowledge of processors and their internals stops being decent at the pentium III level. A quick look on the Atom wikipage says that it doesn’t have any instruction renaming or reordering, which added about 20% to the PIII if I remember. Also, the Atom’s pipeline is a different size and seems to only have 2 integer ALUs. P4s have more. The simple way to think of this is that an Atom can usually do 2 adds at a time whilst a beastly P4 can do, I dunno, 5? Might not sound a lot, but coupled with all the minor power hungry tweaks that a P4 has and it soon adds up.
Think about cars. If two cars have the same horsepower, but one is all aerodynamic and fancy, it’ll accelerate faster and reach a massive top speed, but it’ll guzzle fuel. Whereas a family car with the same horsepower* is designed to limit that speed or distribute it to help the mum turn corners and such.
*I know nothing about cars, and I doubt fast cars have the same horsepower as family cars 
edit: Because I know so little about the current generation of chips, I read a tiny bit. http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/615/2
The author says the first major difference is that the Atom is purely in-order. Infact that site appears to answer all of your, and my own, questions about this issue.
Thanks a lot for your time and help guys!
Much appreciated!
I think the best solution for me is to get a new computer.
I will try it on my old Ibook G4, but as of now it’s used as a media hub.
I’ve produced some nice tunes on a 600MHz PIII. You ought to be fine.
Wasn’t there some resolution issue involving netbooks and Renoise, though?
VERY FAST
… I’m so getting a macbook now.
did you use VST plugins? did you use more than a handful of tracks and native DSPs?
i’m sorry mate… not trying to spit on your achievements, but i seriously doubt those tunes were far beyond from being more complex than tracker modules from legacy formats of the past century.
the smallest possible resolution was lowered so that you can actually start renoise on a netbook.
this does not imply that it will run great or make up a substitute for a real computer that utilizes a CPU that was not solely designed for web-browsing, instant messaging and low-power consumption.
no netbook with a 1.6ghz intel atom is able to play any of the bundled demosongs from start till end without getting stuck. that circumstance alone should suffice to answer all questions and draw a line under the whole matter.
there is, but on the Asus EEE you can set a 1024x768 resolution with a
special screenmode that gives you the ability to scroll the window as far as i know.
there is also a shrink modus that can contract the screen resolution so that you can
get it all on the screen. am i right? i’ve been thinking long and hard about getting
a eee, and scoured the net for information. but my research so far has leaved me
a impression that i should invest a couple of more dollars to get a “Laptop”
i shall have renoise on the move. :]