The new MacBook Pro & plug-ins

14. (23 on the i7.)

Okay, snideness aside (the question makes no sense at all, as every plug-in has completely different computational requirements, and "more" relative to what? A G4? A 2.4 GHz core 2 duo? A 3.06 GHz C2D?),

here are comparative benchmarks that will more or less translate to plug-in performance:


http://www.primatelabs.ca/blog/2010/04/macbookpro-benchmarks/

It will be a bit more powerful, but not in any way that's going to make a massive difference.

All modern machines have a shedload of resource, and are easily capable of making good music. The days of counting plugins are hopefully behind us...

From early benchmarks (generic, not Logic), looks like i7 may be a pretty big improvement.

It's still technically a dual core, but it has hyperthreading and Logic does take advantage of those partial cores. I wouldn't be surprised if these are competitive with the first generation intel quad Mac Pro.

Logic needs to be updated because it's not using he CPU properly unless hyperthreading is disabled.

There's another thread about it here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2417498&start=0&tstart=0

Looks like there's a problem with Logic and the new machines, the app isn't fully using all the available cores so a fair amount of processing power is going unused.

And disabling HT isn't going to really fix the problem, the issue is that the extra cores aren't being used so turning those cores off obviously isn't going to use them.

How do you even disable HT?

Logic doesn't use hyperthreading for technical reasons anyway, so turning off hyperthreading isn't going to do anything, I would have thought.

I guess you haven't read the other thread and you don't have a machine with HT?

Logic absolutely does use HT, if you have a machine with it you can see for yourself.

One of the Logic developers themselves said why Logic doesn't use it, unless I'm remembering wrong...

Will go look...

Edit: I quickly looked through that thread linked above, and saw loads of posts backing up that Logic indeed doesn't use HT, as I said. Did I miss something?

You would have seen Markus' comment in the other thread on BBL, but obviously you're not confident in that statement. I don't have an HT-capable machine so haven't been particularly watching the situation.

It may be that there is a performance improvement through HT in some cases (eg, screen redraws or other non-audio processing), but the main workload of Logic is in shunting and processing 32f data, so the benefits of HT are lost when there is only one FPU per core required to do the processing.

That seems relatively plausible to me, but I'm not massively experienced in this area, so...

Bee Jay wrote:
Edit: I quickly looked through that thread linked above, and saw loads of posts backing up that Logic indeed doesn't use HT, as I said. Did I miss something?

That thread is mainly about how Logic isn't using HT in the new MPB, the reason people expect it to is because it is being used in the quad xeon and iMac i7.

You would have seen Markus' comment in the other thread on BBL, but obviously you're not confident in that statement. I don't have an HT-capable machine so haven't been particularly watching the situation.

Yep. I don't know if he's out of the loop on that specific detail or if he's trying to be cryptic. I have a hard time having much faith in his statements since he said that Logic wouldn't go 64 bit any time soon, and then just weeks later did exactly that.

It's definitely more than just faster redraws, audio benchmarks show much better performance for plugins on machines with HT (close to the performance of that many real processors), and Activity Monitor shows heavy use on the HT cores as well as the full cores.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the idea until you have tested it on a machine with HT hardware.