Well, I've found with my dual 1.8 G5 that RAM isn't the big issue, it's performance. I can't even get my RAM filled up before the VIs start to gag. So the new tower, even with "only" 4 GB RAM installed, will probably still be a very useful machine! I'm drooling over it right now, though I probably won't be buying any hardware for a while yet... I just picked up a MacBook to slave for a few more VIs, so we'll see how that goes first. Apple's RAM prices appear to be about as crazy as one might expect. Why can't they be a bit more reasonable? I'm sure they'd sell more upgrades if their prices weren't quite so far out of whack! At least they ship with 1 GB, finally.

J.

I think the ram is 256-bit now. Wow. Logic should be able to access samples faster on this machine should'nt it? I'm no programmer, but just to rewrite logic code in 64bit why would that be an issue, unless they were going to entirely rewrite logic from the ground up? It doesn't make sense to have Leopard runnning a 32 bit logic app.

I guess running 4 GiGs of samples with ease would be acceptable for now jbm. [8-)]

Btw, if it hasn't been said.. this machine is ABSURD. OMG! [:O]

Herb, CM, Golem, what is your views and plans regarding all this new firepower? [H]

haha ... plan a) let's get one of those beasts on our desk; plan b) lets get leopard and some 64-bit audio drivers; plan c) lets get a 64-bit sequencer app (possibly logic); plan d) start rewriting some code; plan e) get a beta checked out by a team of testers; plan f) let's announce it [:P]
christian

Sounds like a plan .. now we only need about £5,000 for the dream machine ... oh yeah .. and I gotta buy the VI yet .. damn .. I'm way behind. Oh well ... back to my Quad G5 and my faithful ol' first edition [[:P]]

I'm still lovin what I got .. but if I ever make money outta this life .. I lok forward to the Mac Pro system in a few years time [[:P]]

@cm said:

haha ... plan a) let's get one of those beasts on our desk; plan b) lets get leopard and some 64-bit audio drivers; plan c) lets get a 64-bit sequencer app (possibly logic); plan d) start rewriting some code; plan e) get a beta checked out by a team of testers; plan f) let's announce it [:P]
christian

Sorry to intrude, but to play a full orchestra on a single machine is, I suppose, the dream of all of us (I mean, musicians who don’t like to waste their time), and if the VSL teams plane to rewrite their players, I suggest to give to the user the option to do not buffer samples in RAM anymore. It would solved many many problems.

Imagine :

One computer.

No more loading time.


Isn’t it the ‘ready-to-work’ solution we need ?


I think actual RAMDrives could already make this dream real on actual 32bit PC/Mac, with a decent ‘real-time’ latency (around 7ms), for a decent orchestra (except maybe percussions).

@Another User said:

I think actual RAMDrives could already make this dream real on actual 32bit PC/Mac

you might want to read through my related former posts. neither the one nor the other is realisic.
christian

Sorry, I didn’t find any mention of SSD in your former posts.

So I suppose that 20 microseconds is not yet enough. I don’t pretend to know.

@Crystal said:

Sorry to intrude, but to play a full orchestra on a single machine is, I suppose, the dream of all of us

And, considering the topic of this thread, I'd say that it remains a dream.

The new Intels have a bright future in this regard. Already for "lesser" libraries one machine might suffice-- but for heavy-hitting VI users, it's going to be a LOOOOOOOOONG time before one machine will really do the trick.

This will take a combo of things:

1. Apple will have to make faster machines than they do even now, Mac Pro included

2. Hard drive transfer rates will have to increase as standard, as well as seek times

3. VSL will perhaps find even more ingenious ways of optimizing its software for greater efficiency

4. Leopard and the other 'felines' will have to become a way of life with bit addressing

5. DAW hosts will have to break their RAM access limits


... and by the time all of this happens, users will have demanded so much more from their software that the poor Mac Pro 3G mega machine will be the new dinosaur. [:D]

The cycle continues.

@cm said:

haha ... plan a) let's get one of those beasts on our desk; plan b) lets get leopard and some 64-bit audio drivers; plan c) lets get a 64-bit sequencer app (possibly logic); plan d) start rewriting some code; plan e) get a beta checked out by a team of testers; plan f) let's announce it [:P]
christian

hi Christian
how about a plan for the intel world:

a) Get a 64-bit multicore/multiprocessor machine - exists allready
b) Get a 64-bit OS - win x64 is allready here
c) Get a 64-bit sequencer - use Sonar

Now you're allready at: d) Start rewriting som code!
[[:D]] [[;)]] [[:D]]

@Another User said:

This will take a combo of things:

1. Apple will have to make faster machines than they do even now, Mac Pro included

2. Hard drive transfer rates will have to increase as standard, as well as seek times

3. VSL will perhaps find even more ingenious ways of optimizing its software for greater efficiency

4. Leopard and the other 'felines' will have to become a way of life with bit addressing

5. DAW hosts will have to break their RAM access limits

Hi, JWL. ....About RAM limitation, I though buffering on a SSD (Solid State Drive) could be enough (200 times faster than hard drives), and permanent (but as I’ll get ‘no comment’...). There is now even some solutions without bus bottleneck, for industries. Why not for studios ?

Again, this library is special. It cost the price of a car and doesn’t deserve the actual hardware.

Multiple machines solutions (and loading times) are not productive for a pro musician.

i like this kind of diskussion - primary because it would be really nice to be allowed using such a setup (and be it even for testing purposes only) ...
given the data througput would increase by the factor 100 (nice but not the point, because the amount of samples to be streamed parallel is not the issue) ...
given the latency would decrease by the factor 1000 (to ~20µs, very important because only such values would allow to reduce the buffer size) ...
so lets ask our management as an example for a 64 GB solid state disk with this specification, say the DSI3250 ... list price $ 190.000.- ... ouch ... well, maybe next year ...
[6] christian

This one is 1000 bucks :
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/products.htm#hyperosHDIIproduct

But with the SATA bus bottleneck...
Is this bottleneck critical ?
If it is, then, end of the discussion.

When you say that ‘the amount of samples to be streamed parallel is not the issue’, does that mean that for sampling technology it’s the IOPS that maters rather than the bandwidth ? If it is, then the bus bottleneck is not so critical, or I miss something ?

I’m a bit confused about measures.

The actual best seek time for hard drives is around 5 milliseconds (ms), right ?

The seek time for affordable SSDs (my link) is around 50 microseconds (µS) (but with bus bottleneck).

What is exactly the seek time of our actual ‘on mother board’ RAM ? Nanoseconds ?

(Sorry for my ignorance, I can’t find the magic formula to google it...)

thanks for the link to the product, i've ordered (for another purpose) the GigaByte iRAM ...
ok, 64 GB = 4 x 16 GB = 4 X $ 1.000.- (for the board) + 32 x $ 200.- = $ 10.400 (excl. VAT) for a poor-man's SSD (4 free sATA ports needed, system may remain 160 minutes without power, otherwise ... total data loss).
no need to mention for the symphonic cube you'd need 6-7 of them (besides about 50 free sATA ports of course) and i'm not sure this would be very welcome by users who sometimes consider the SC for $ 10.000.- to be expensive ...

technical details: this page says to have tested the hyperdrive on random read (without providing too many details like size of requested data packets) and mentions a latency of 0,2 ms. this would be a factor of 20 compared to the fastest sATA and SCSI drives and so calculating some overhead (but not other system latencies)buffer size could be reduced to 1/16 to about 4 kB. so buffering all 800.000 samples from the SC would need a computer with 3 GB accessible RAM - nice, should work. but - oops - what is this? average CPU usage 31% (on a not specified CPU) with a maximum of 67% ... seems to be unusable for a sampling computer.
the data thoughput is IMO not the real issue, because an average 40 MB/s like with many current harddrives would allow about 230 voices (stereo, already taking the realtime-decompression into consideration) to be streamed.

so all in all - to go this route seems to be not very practicable for me.
christian

And thanks for iRAM , I didn’t know it. Those ‘large public’ products are rare, I can’t find any catalogue.

I’ll buy one as soon as possible for my OS, anyway.


Your projection about RAM to fill up the HyperDrive IV is even optimistic, it needs ECC registered.

But, hey...

@Another User said:

buffer size could be reduced to 1/16 to about 4 kB. so buffering all 800.000 samples from the SC would need a computer with 3 GB accessible RAM

This is the very good part of the demonstration...

Cause the whole point is to (only) buffer, of course. I don’t expect those SSDs to stream, for the VSL, it’s economically absurd, for now, as you show it.

But CPUs usage maters. They look weird. It’s only an HyperDrive II test. Can’t find any HyperDrive IV test...

@Another User said:

This will take a combo of things:

1. Apple will have to make faster machines than they do even now, Mac Pro included

2. Hard drive transfer rates will have to increase as standard, as well as seek times

3. VSL will perhaps find even more ingenious ways of optimizing its software for greater efficiency

4. Leopard and the other 'felines' will have to become a way of life with bit addressing

5. DAW hosts will have to break their RAM access limits

Hi, JWL. ....About RAM limitation, I though buffering on a SSD (Solid State Drive) could be enough (200 times faster than hard drives), and permanent (but as I’ll get ‘no comment’...). There is now even some solutions without bus bottleneck, for industries. Why not for studios ?

Again, this library is special. It cost the price of a car and doesn’t deserve the actual hardware.

Multiple machines solutions (and loading times) are not productive for a pro musician.

I won't disagree with you on this one.

The term "prosumer" still applies to what's publically available in the way of certain features. VSL is indeed a special bundle, so custom upgrades to hardware are in order. No doubt, manufacturers have built systems more powerful than they will release to the general public, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the cleverest bits of these systems are available to industries.

Then again, I'm reminded of this photo showing 600 G5's networked together for the sake of mastering the Star Wars DVDs!!!
http://www.apple.com/pro/film/lowry/starwars/lowryqtvr.html

@Crystal said:

Multiple machines solutions (and loading times) are not productive for a pro musician.

What makes you sure of such a statement?

Most (if not all) of the "tech-oriented" big-time composers and arrangers (music and film music industry) use multi-computer setups.

Gigastudio is a the best example of that trend.

I am myself right now setting up a studio for my boss where the VI library is being splitted between 8 Mac Mini's. And I know three other composers who will be following us...

Jerome

Crystal, you're trying to find the end of a rainbow! Everyone has wanted a 1-machine solution since the beginning of the digital age. But as soon as one comes, developers take advantage of the extra power and we're chasing the next one.

Two 64-bit operating systems are coming out next year, and as soon as the software we use is adapted, the memory access issues that have caused us to use multiple machines will disappear. But will something else bring the machine to its knees?

@Nick Batzdorf said:

Crystal, you're trying to find the end of a rainbow! Everyone has wanted a 1-machine solution since the beginning of the digital age. But as soon as one comes, developers take advantage of the extra power and we're chasing the next one.

Two 64-bit operating systems are coming out next year, and as soon as the software we use is adapted, the memory access issues that have caused us to use multiple machines will disappear. But will something else bring the machine to its knees?

I hope *my* point wasn't missed. The apparent impracticality seems to be rooted in the fact that demands for one machine always seem to bring it to its knees no matter how fast it is. All too often when a new machine is announced the discussion resumes as to whether The End-All Dream Machine has finally been created. No doubt, networking is going to be here for a while, but perhaps more will be done on fewer machines without today's brick walls.

I'm quite excited about what's in store for 2007 as far as VI users are concerned-- but the techno power chase is never-ending. What distinguishes this discussion from others I've seen is the amount of practical thinking being put forth, which I appreciate.