E series CPU's Brute force

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Mon Mar 12, 2007 12:55 pm

I have had the little E6400 in my Cubase / SFP DAW. I thought I'd save the E6700 for the MOAD ( mother of all DAWs ) of the future. But greed seems to have reared it's beautiful head. I have been sitting idely by waiting for developers to churn out more libraries for GVI / GS3 amd it seems like the party is slowing down. So I said fuck it, go w/ a VSTi and see what's up. My God. I have loaded a virtual instrument x 4 and have added a VSTi synth w/ high polyphony, and this DAWg just wants more !! Can I expect even greedier amounts of loaded VSTi's w/ the E6700 ??!! I had no idea that this is the real power behind VSTi's. I think that the sample based ones are more to my liking. There are so many to choose from. I am gonna start designing a full symphony Orchestra, after I get the basic meat and potatoes nailed. My old Akai CD's just can't compare anymore, but some will be saved in the performances 4 they lack other examples such as footsteps in 'da sewer, and weird sound fx that I'll never use. Except I do torment the audience w/ fake applause patches, and use all of the 3 stooges, and star trek FX. When really top heavy women walk by I use the famous nngggyyyaahhh from Curly as I wipe my face of sweat.
Will I see a drastic difference in the 2 CPU's. The E6400 has 2MB of unified L2 cache, and is 600 MHz slower than the 4MB L2 6700.

Peace Through Superior DSP's,

Post by **garyb** » Mon Mar 12, 2007 1:03 pm

yeah, the sample based vstis(romplers) are pretty good. basically they're just proprietary libraries that are like giga but with nicer guis.

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Mon Mar 12, 2007 1:20 pm

I'm getting a woody.

DSP ADD!CT · Post by **DSP ADD!CT** » Mon Mar 12, 2007 11:17 pm

brotha man jimmy...
try the cakewalk rapture and dimension pro, very good romplers with some nice expansions.
i did a few big projects on my new pc now and im really astonished by the power of the e6600.
i cant seem to get that cpu meter in cubase over half of its capacity

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 4:29 am

I too am shocked @ the power achieved through VST. I use to think VST sucked until I heard Sonalksisss, and started experimenting w/ GVI. Until I feel the need to expand, I will use the E6400. But Larry Seyers Acoustic Drum Library uses several different instances of convolution reverb and mic modelling / placement on each drum. This is what caught my attention. The CPU meter finally moved up to about 30% w/ 2 x GVI's running, and 2 x VSTi synths . So let the games begin. If I feel I need the E6700, I have it, but damn these CPU's have come to life while I concentrated on DSP's and their project size. The best of both worlds.

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 8:26 am

no reason to get excited...
it's just the big chache (and probably improved pipelines) inside the CPU that make the CPU 'more available' as it's waiting less for memory data.
I didn't really check it, but afaik a CPU meter isn't reflecting 'true' calculation power at all... it only shows how much CPU resources are 'in use' and how much are 'idle'

cheers, Tom

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 8:37 am

Is it the IPS that makes modern CPU's so efficient Brotha' Man Astro?

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 9:01 am

well, I don't find them very effective at all...

I still have one of those pizza Macs around with a clock rate that's just 1% of a current Pentium - working on the Pentium doesn't feel a hundred times faster, let alone the oldie had to calculate the entire graphic screen, too.

Anyway, this makes me curious - I have a compiler for both systems (made by the same manufacturer), so I could measure the same (benchmark) program on both CPUs. As already mentioned the 1.66 CoreDuo performs 30% faster that a 2.4 Pentium 4 - if I remember correctly the bench exists for the old version, too.

to be honest I always wished I could have that old CPU with a current clockrate and (even more important) the current memory size - but in the lean OS of the old days - that would hunt, as you like to call it...

cheers, Tom

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 11:15 am

Yes,
I believe that qualifies as a hunting DAWg .

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 1:40 pm

here's a screenshot from about 20 years ago...
it shows an 'instrument builder' (part of the ConcertWare package) via additive synthesis running on a 8 MHZ machine with 1MB Ram.
Which means that 4 complete 'computers' would fit inside your CoreDuo, the latter running at a clockrate 300 times as fast

but the true reason for the screenshot is in the right corner:
instead of the additive method you could also draw a free form wavecycle - doesn't it look exactly like the respective Flexor device ?

btw the resulting waveform of the additive synthesis is also plotted as a graph

cheers, Tom

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 2:16 pm

Way Cool,
I should have kept my Atari Commodore w/ Opcode.

JV