The quad core iMac

Antimon · Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 7:33 am Post subject: The quad core iMac

I'm lusting for the 27" as a christmas present to myself. There are two kinds, one with a 3.06 GHz Core2Duo and a quad core at 2.66 GHz, they claim the latter to have 2.4 times the performance compared to the former, because of better bus architecture combined with double the core amount.

Any ideas about what impact that processor difference will have on music making applications? I mostly run Ableton Live and ChucK, plus a little Reaper. Live is supposed to be able to make better use of multiprocessor environments nowadays. The Core2Duo looks like great value (it can double as a TV set in my bedroom), but if I can cram more out of Live's physical modeling thingies that could be worth the extra dosh, even though I don't think ChucK can make use of mutliple cores yet.

/Stefan

dewdrop_world · Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 8:26 pm Post subject:

Don't know about ChucK, but one of the supercollider developers (Tim Blechmann) recently released source code for a multicore-aware alternative to the built-in scsynth engine. In the new one, called supernova, there is a new type of "parallel group" node in the server, which assumes that none of its immediate children depend on the results from siblings, meaning that they can be distributed for parallel processing on different cores. It hasn't become mainstream yet, but it was worth mentioning that supercollider is moving in this direction.

James

Inventor · Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 8:32 pm Post subject:

Well, apparently supercollider is making strides where ChucK is not. Ah well, diversity at it's best eh?

Les