New Mac Pro... 2.8GHz quad vs 2.4GHz 8-core?

I wouldn't buy a quad Mac Pro in a million years, one of the worst values Apple has offered in a long time. In that range of price and performance an iMac would do just as well.

Logic does use the extra cores, so it's good to have them. The 2009 and 2010 MP are also pretty much the same machine except for some CPU options so a used one might be good if you can find a deal.

I bought a westmere 8 core 2.4 when it came out to replace my trusty old 2.66 dual core MP. Is it any better or quicker for most of what I do? Not really. Don't expect too much of a performance bump.

If you use large library VI's, they cannot spread over several cores, so the speed of the processor is te main issue. It was Mike that alerted me to this in the first place.

That said, it has been solid, and I can't complan about how it has travelled over the last 2 years. I was advised against 6 and 12 core machines by the mac guy (who probably didn't know what he was talking about... the world of 6 core hasn't fallen in). I was just hoping for it to leave my old machine for dead, which it didn't do. Except that my old machine had just died, which was why I jumped.

I have since had my old machine fixed... one of the early intel core 2 duo 2.66 machines, and I use it in studio B. It is still a good performer.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has promised something really special for MacPro sometme in 2013. I'd be waiting til then, if you can.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1167247/cook_apple_planning_professional_mac_for _2013.html

But $2700AU is a LOT less than I paid, so... Why are they so much more expensive in OZ? And can you even get the 8 core anymore? Why don't they put 2 of the 3.2gig quads in a machine to make an 8 core at 3.2? And why have the 12 core machines been slowed down to 2.4?

We are slaves to Apple.

Presumably a lot of vi's would use a lot of cores. I got a better performance improvement by making a raid set to speed up the sample drive. That's probably the main bottleneck for very large vi's that play many samples at once eg Hollywood Strings.

I should point out that I am still on Logic 9.1.5 and OSX 10.6.8. Apparently 9.1.7 uses the cores better.

QtheMusic wrote:

If you use large library VI's, they cannot spread over several cores, so the speed of the processor is te main issue.

I wouldn't agree with that. If you have say one instance of Kontakt with 16 instruments loaded, that will all be on one core. But if you have 16 instances of Kontakt with one instrument each, they will distribute over 16 cores (and Logic does take advantage of hyperthreading cores). I definitely see a big difference having more cores. And Kontakt actually can use more than one core with one instance, it's the one plugin I'm aware of that can do that.

The big catch with logic is that it only uses one core for any tracks and instruments that are record enabled, so with "live" tracks there is a bit of an advantage for clock speed over number of cores. Hopefully they'll fix that in a future Logic update. So that's a limitation playing parts in, but for mixing and editing all cores are used on playback.

Personally I'd buy a machine with more cores over faster clock speed, although I'd go the other way if it was a small difference in number of cores and big difference in clock speed, say 3.4 six core versus 2.4 eight core.

Could the VIs be designed to use multiple cores, or is it only the DAW that can do that?