Origineel geplaatst door dobbit
Vooral die laatste opmerking vind ik heel intressant. Ik heb het namelijk nog niet voor elkaar gekregen een SX2 omgeving soepel te laten draaien met Hyper Threading geactiveerd. Blijkbaar heb jij daar wel goede ervaringen mee. Wat is precies de truck?
Niks truc... gewoon geïnstalleerd
Hyperthreading Tests
Back in PC Notes August 2003 I explained the ins and outs of Intel's Hyperthreading technology, which lets Xeon and Pentium 4C processors appear to Windows XP Home and Professional or Linux 2.4x as two 'virtual' processors instead of one physical one. They each share the various internal 'sub-units', including the all-important floating-point unit, but can run two separate processing 'threads' simultaneously. I've had HT disabled on my own Pentium 4C 2.8GHz machine until now, partly because I still run Windows 98SE partitions alongside my XP ones. Since 98SE doesn't recognise HT technology it may cause problems to leave it enabled in the BIOS. In addition, as I reported in PC Notes January 2004, GigaStudio 2.53, which I use, won't run with HT enabled either.
I recently had a Dual Xeon PC from Red Submarine to review for SOS. Since this has true multiple processors, I was interested to see how the virtual processors of an HT-enabled machine compared to it. I used my own Pentium 4C 2.8GHz PC, with Hyperthreading enabled, as the test bench and began my tests by running Waves plug-ins, inside Wavelab 4.01a, on this PC. The plug-ins included the Renaissance and Trueverb reverbs, C1 compressor/gate, C4 multiband parametric processor, and Renaissance EQ running six bands. For each one I made measurements with and without Hyperthreading enabled, and apart from experimental error the results were identical.
This confirmed what I had expected. Hyperthreading makes no difference to single apps that are not aware of it, nor those that run a single stereo audio stream rather than multiple audio tracks, each with their own complement of plug-ins or soft synths. (In the latter case multi-processing is more likely to be of benefit). However, you may well notice performance improvements when running several such applications simultaneously.
Next, I ran Steinberg's 'Five Towers' Performance Test, the 'Five Towers' version 2.0 test, which has higher CPU overheads, and Steinberg's Cubase SX 2.0.1 'Heaven And Hell' demo.
This provided more interesting results, because SX 2 relies on running multiple 'threads' and has been optimised for HT.
I measured all three songs in 'Stop' (only plug-ins running) and 'Play' (with soft synths as well), at both 23ms latency and 3ms latency, to isolate the effects of interrupt overheads. To explain this a little further, as you drop latency below 23ms CPU overhead rises, simply due to the massive number of interrupts per second. Within the bounds of experimental error, most results for each of the three songs were almost identical, except for the 3ms 'Play' values, which showed a significant improvement of between 10 and 12 percent.
Although these figures aren't as high as some I've seen, they're still not to be sneezed at and they demonstrate that
Hyperthreading works best with Cubase SX 2 just where musicians already need a helping hand — running soft synths with low latency.
Cakewalk's Sonar 3.1 also has a new multi-threaded engine that works with Hyperthreading as well as true multi-processor PCs. Cakewalk's Ron Kuper has recently published a 'White Paper' on its performance, and while it provides significant improvements with a true dual-processor PC (see my review of Red Sub's Dual Xeon PC starting on page 90 for more details), it doesn't do so well with Hyperthreading.
Cakewalk themselves measured a six to seven percent improvement on a Pentium 4 3.2GHz HT system when they switched on the new engine, and I measured a similar four to five percent improvement on my own P4 2.8GHz machine. However, after disabling Hyperthreading altogether in the BIOS and measuring Sonar 3.1 overhead again, the results were less than two percent better than those with HT on and Sonar's new engine enabled. So overall Sonar 3.1 doesn't seem to noticeably benefit from HT being enabled.
Unfortunately, there are further stings in the tail. Despite HT having been available since 2002, there are still audio applications that disagree with it, and if you're currently running one of these you won't be able to activate HT in your BIOS until an update appears. As previously mentioned, for me the most serious is GigaStudio, but this should be solved when version 3.0 is released in June.
More seriously, Digidesign state specifically on their web site that HT must be disabled if you're running any of their hardware under Windows XP. I've come across other users who have problems with NI's Kontakt, and Cakewalk have recently posted a warning on their web site that some Pace-protected software can cause a crash or complete lock-up with HT enabled. Antares plugins are specifically mentioned. Waves plug-ins are apparently happy with HT, which fits in with my own experience.
Published: Sound On Sound - June 2004
Bovendien was ik eindelijk eens toe aan een PC met power en dat maakt de Xeon meer dan waar! Als je een profi systeem wilt dan ga je voor een dual xeon!!! Alleen jammer dat SX dat nog niet helemaal goed heeft geimplementeerd maar das vast een kwestie van tijd!
