My 6 core 980X came in the mail so I will be testing it hopefully this weekend to see the difference in speed and power.

Stephen,

Keep in mind I have always run on one single machine.  It is only with the introduction of Dimension Strings and Brass that I hit a limitation now, due to so many individual tracks versus the old style which were entire sections in one track (appassionata, chamber etc.).

One machine is very easy to do with MIR Pro and all those things (vienna suite), Cubase 7.5, Studio One v2.6 etc.  It just depends on how many actually tracks you intend to use without "freezing" any of them.  I setup this week individual group tracks and audio tracks for all my sections so that I can freeze them into audio tracks as I go to free up the remaining power.  So whatever results I get this weekend, I will be making work for me as I have decided I won't buy a new machine as it's not necessary.

When I am not playing all the dimension products my machine is sitting at about 10-20% with 40 instruments playing and MIR Pro, with full vienna suite presets on instruments.  And with a complete FX chain on the master output and a Bricasti M7 send.  This machine is doing more than I did before with 3-4 machines and I am not ready to give it up yet.

I do have a 4930K motherboard system I purchased to actually use for internet and gaming ;), that if all else fails, I could buy memory for that and it would add an enormous upgrade as well.  I just haven't talked myself into this yet.  Let me receive pops and clicks all weekend long this weekend and I might be singing another song on Monday :).

Maestro2be

Thanks for the input!  

Maestro2be: Good luck and have fun getting the new system running!  Eager to hear how it goes.

Dietz:  Thanks for running the numbers.  So, your machine is faster than I had estimated.  The dual processor score seems to put it mid-way between a 6- and an 8-core NMP.  (A seven core? ha!)

So the results weren't as good as I were hoping, but certainly what I expected to see.  VE PRO/MIR PRO didn't really respond very much to the additional threads.  I moved it from 4 threads to 8 and only seen about a 10% CPU reduction when adding 2 more cores/4 threads to it.  I sure was hoping for more than that.

I am able to now work at 512 samples latency but I am hitting about 85-95% CPU so I won't push my machine that hard as it will run to hot.  I haven't fully decided what I will do yet but I am not entirely happy with the results.

One option I have is to build the second machine I have that has a 4930K processor and use it to process MIR PRO.  I just can't stand all the latency.

Maestro2be

@cgernaey said:

[...] I just can't stand all the latency.

 Why don't you just bypass the one instance of MIR Pro which is used for the instrument you plan to play in real-time?

Hi Dietz,

I will give that a try Dietz.

I have found for me that playing them in realtime, within the room itself gives me a much more realistic performance than when I don't.  If I take it out of the room etc. then I tend to get either a to aggressive performance, or one that isn't enough.  If I play it back in it's pretty much end result sound, I find that I naturally just place it with the right dynamics the first time, versus going back and having to tweak so much after.

I even thought about making some cheap Vienna Suite Reverb Busses to just use for initial recording, and then do the actually mixing/final in MIR PRO.  I just have to try this out and see if it gives me good results in the end, with no added time.  I could simply put a few instances on the busses of VE PRO 5 and then disable them, and re-activate the MIR PRO for each instrument and see how that works.

It certainly would reduce my CPU usage by enormous ammounts.

Thanks,

Maestro2be

@cgernaey said:

I just can't stand all the latency.

Assuming a sample rate of 48K, then 512 / 48000 = ~1ms latency. So why is that such a problem? 1ms should be un-noticeable. (Or is there something I'm missing?)

PS. If I was you, I'd definitely build that 4930 machine for a 50% (in theory) improvement. (Trouble is, the reality rarely lives up to the theory).

Hi Phil,

The latency is much more than that simple math formula.  There is the latency buffers that are more than doubled by adding VE PRO and MIR into the mix.  If you use VE PRO with MIR PRO, you would see that it has it's own latency settings for MIR PRO and also a buffer multiplier on the front connection page which multiplies by 0-4 times the latency settings.  Mine is set for 2 times latency already.

But as far as a single 512 latency assuming you are using nothing but an instrument track with no reverb or effects, and running it locally in your DAW there is still an amount of latency that I can clearly detect.  It is certainly much less, but I am a pianist and it's very noticeable when I perform on it first, and then move to my DAW and try to use Vienna Imperial.  It's also very noticeable when working with drums that tend to be much faster responding and instant type instruments.  Strings etc. are already a little sloppy so it's ok for those.  Some people don't have an issue with the latency and others do :).  I am one of the people who does :).

I tell you what, I am certainly interested in the idea of building the 4930k and upgrading the memory etc. to see the results difference, but it gets very old wasting so much money to not end up where you need to be lol.  The other issue is that I would need to buy an RME PCIe card.

What I am going to test with it is putting just MIR PRO on it, and let it handle processing MIR PRO.  This combination would work great as long as I can get some really low latency on the gigabit connection.

Maestro2be

Take a look at the specs in my signature. I just had these machines built. They were relatively cost effective. I can run *almost* anything I want + MIR Pro at 256 samples/48k/Cubase 7.5. I'm sure I could get that number even better if I replaced my MOTU with an RME MadiFX card or something. All the slave does is run VSL + MIR Pro. I don't add any many mix plugins on the master computer until I'm nearly done programming. Using 2 480 GB Samsung EVO SSDs for the samples on the slave.

Thanks for the information.  Yea those specs are almost exactly what my Slave would be, except I have a 4930k instead of the 4960k.  This just further pushes me to finish the build and then test having it just process MIR PRO for me.  I am sure it will solve my reaching 100% CPU issue, I will just have to workout a workflow to remove the latency while I am doing certain things.

I don't think this setup would be to much to work with each day until I decide one day to build another super machine (I am waiting on the new Xeon V2 15 core processors).

Maestro2be

I am still curious what specs would be needed to run it all in a single box.  For example, if you are using a 6-core master and 6-core slave, would a 12-core of the same processor family do the trick?

(I am envisioning a workflow of running a DAW, in my case Digital Performer, plus VSL with a full orchestra, and minimal effects while originally laying down MIDI.  Then fine-tuning and mixing using a MIR stage.  I want to minimize theneed to bounce to audio and freeze tracks while fine-tuning the arrangement and the mix.)   My old set up was a Master (now dead machine) + 2 slaves, and I'd really like to downsize the physical footprint if it can be done.

I don't think anytime soon that a single machine will be able to give low latencies. The tradeoff has always been more cores for lower clock speeds.

To be honest I am not sure how many cores etc. it would require at this point.  I will one day, but not this moment :).  I can tell you again from my current experiences that I went from 4 cores at 4GHZ to 6 cores of extreme processor with more cache on all 3 levels, and Overclocked it at 4.5GHZ and I only gained 10-15% increase in performance.

There is simply diminishing returns of only doing processor upgrade.  You are still going to be hurting by the memory bus and chipset architecture.

I did see a company building 64 core AMD workstations for between 5000.00 and 8000.00 depending on the other selections like video card, 256GB of RAM etc.  How many SSD's etc.

Me personally, I will just choke on and wait for another 1-2 architecture changes for bus speeds etc. to increase.  The new architectures coming soon will have DDR4 finally which will also help.  But of course I will then wait for them to stabalize it all.

I built my machine last night but need to update the bios tonight and install windows 8.1 on it (going windows 8.1 for this build).  Then I will run some tests on it.  Problem is I can't do apples to apples because I don't have 24GB of ram for it like I do my other machine.  I would have to purchase more.  If the initial testing goes great, I will do that however and probably just host my samples and MIR on this machine and my DAW and plugins on my master.  More to come.

Maestro2be