In other threads, I had mentioned that I have a new M4 Mac Pro, and that getting it up on S1 and all my peripherals and plugins, while not trouble free, went better than expected. I know that there's a lot of conjecture about how it will actually perform, and I really want to see for myself, as well as see if there's any best practices/workflows that will let me squeeze more out of it.
To get a sense of what's going on, I picked up iStat, which is an excellent system monitoring tool (bonus - got it half price for Black Friday). Here's the CPU panel:
As a first test, I wanted to quickly push it to its limits, so I grabbed 8 audio tracks, and started loading up T-Racks tape plugins on them. These are notoriously poorly behaved CPU hogs. For reference, on the Mini, a UADx 1176 compressor shows as "1" in the Performance monitor, the T-Racks tape range between 7 and 12!
On my previous machine (Intel 9900k), I could put on 2 of these before everything fell apart. On the Mini I was able to put 71 across the 7 tracks - this is what you're seeing in the screen grab. A few observations:
Please keep all Studio One complaints off this thread, including the whole efficiency core debate. I want to see this board grow and thrive, and I'd like to provide useful information that could help someone make their own decision if they're contemplating a purchase.
To get a sense of what's going on, I picked up iStat, which is an excellent system monitoring tool (bonus - got it half price for Black Friday). Here's the CPU panel:
As a first test, I wanted to quickly push it to its limits, so I grabbed 8 audio tracks, and started loading up T-Racks tape plugins on them. These are notoriously poorly behaved CPU hogs. For reference, on the Mini, a UADx 1176 compressor shows as "1" in the Performance monitor, the T-Racks tape range between 7 and 12!
On my previous machine (Intel 9900k), I could put on 2 of these before everything fell apart. On the Mini I was able to put 71 across the 7 tracks - this is what you're seeing in the screen grab. A few observations:
- This was at 48Khz, with a buffer size of 4096, process precision single (32 bit) and dropout protection off
- Got the same result with buffer size of 64 and dropout protection of 2048/1024. With 512, I had to disable three plugins.
- Changing to double precision did not seem to affect the results
- Changing the sample rate to 96K dropped the total plugins to 52.
- It fails in an "all or nothing" way. Audio is perfect, and adding one more plugin causes major dropouts.
- During playback, you can see the load on the individual cores constantly change. I had read that the M4 had logic to handle core balancing that is much more aggressive than past processors, and that seems to be the case.
- With Studio One, at full load the loudest the fans got was 47 db. (1 ft away, measured by my Apple Watch). The fan was running at 55%/3100 rpm.
- Take the load down slightly, the fan drops to 2000 rpm and is inaudible. Real world I don't expect this to be a problem, but I imagine if I was running an application that hit the GPU equally hard, it would be noticeable.
- This is a new machine, so I don't have lots of other processes running, and certainly nothing that seems to want to use the performance cores.
- Because I was away from my studio, for this test I was using my Komplete Audio 6. I'll repeat it later on my Quantum.
Please keep all Studio One complaints off this thread, including the whole efficiency core debate. I want to see this board grow and thrive, and I'd like to provide useful information that could help someone make their own decision if they're contemplating a purchase.
