Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

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dreamuse
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Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by dreamuse »

I've recently upgraded my processor tray on my 2009 mac pro to 12 cores, and am now in the process of seeing where the system starts to crackle when bringing down the buffer settings. As part of this, I brought up the CPU usage meter, and noticed that the virtual core slots are displaying as totally non-active. I seem to remember bringing up the meter while my old tray (8 core) was in place, and seeing all 16 slots' meters moving.

Can anyone clue me in here?

Much thanks,

Len
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by James Steele »

Gee, that's interesting. It's going to bring up a lot of speculation. I have no idea but it would be interesting to see if you could stress test with a different DAW, and see if the same thing happens.
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by mikehalloran »

If you have Kontakt, create 12 instances. Per many posts over the years, DP will assign one per core up to the number of cores.
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by dreamuse »

I took a file and duplicated the MIDI and VI tracks to the point I had a ton of Kontakt, Omni and RMX instances, all set to play in real time. Yea, that got the virtual cores going. :) Preference definitely appears to be the actual cores, which makes sense assuming there's more efficiency in using them vs. the virtual ones.
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Gravity Jim
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by Gravity Jim »

What virtual cores?
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by cuttime »

Gravity Jim wrote:What virtual cores?
I'll take a stab at it. In my case it is an Intel gimmick. Their marketing term for it is "hyperthreading". What this really means is beyond me, but in the real world my quad core i7 acts like an 8 core. If I open Activity Monitor and open the CPU window I see 8 cores. Now if this is really better than a fast quad I can't say, but Intel insists that it is. I can't speak to the OP, since I don't know what processor they have, but I think this is what they are referring to.
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by Gravity Jim »

cuttime wrote:
Gravity Jim wrote:What virtual cores?
I'll take a stab at it. In my case it is an Intel gimmick. Their marketing term for it is "hyperthreading". What this really means is beyond me, but in the real world my quad core i7 acts like an 8 core. If I open Activity Monitor and open the CPU window I see 8 cores. Now if this is really better than a fast quad I can't say, but Intel insists that it is. I can't speak to the OP, since I don't know what processor they have, but I think this is what they are referring to.
Ah, thank you, cuttime. I'm not running the iChips, so I was not familiar with the term.
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by Michael Canavan »

Gravity Jim wrote:
cuttime wrote:
Gravity Jim wrote:What virtual cores?
I'll take a stab at it. In my case it is an Intel gimmick. Their marketing term for it is "hyperthreading". What this really means is beyond me, but in the real world my quad core i7 acts like an 8 core. If I open Activity Monitor and open the CPU window I see 8 cores. Now if this is really better than a fast quad I can't say, but Intel insists that it is. I can't speak to the OP, since I don't know what processor they have, but I think this is what they are referring to.
Ah, thank you, cuttime. I'm not running the iChips, so I was not familiar with the term.
Nerding out a bit here, it's a marketing term for the ability for all modern chips to run hyper threading.
From Everymac on the 09 Mac Pro Xeon chips in my computer...
It also supports "Hyper-Threading" -- which "allows two threads to run simultaneously on each core" (so Mac OS X recognizes sixteen total cores on this model, eight real and eight virtual)
Intel are trying to sell it heavier with the i7's than the Xeons that's all.
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by Gravity Jim »

Ah, so the Xenon chips do this, they just hadn't figured out a cool term for the Best Buy crowd.

But didn't someone say above that their monitor is showing twice as many cores as actually exist? I haven't seen this.
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by HCMarkus »

If you opening Activity Monitor (Applications>Utilities folder) and display CPU Usage, you will see a meter with twice the number of columns as actual physical cores if your CPU(s) support hyper-threading.
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by mikehalloran »

HCMarkus wrote:If you opening Activity Monitor (Applications>Utilities folder) and display CPU Usage, you will see a meter with twice the number of columns as actual physical cores if your CPU(s) support hyper-threading.
TechTool Pro did that for awhile a few years ago but they fixed it. Except for hyperthreading, you don’t have twice as many cores as far as I know. DP is not going to run 8 instances of Kontakt better than 4 instances on my iMac.
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by HCMarkus »

mikehalloran wrote:
HCMarkus wrote:If you opening Activity Monitor (Applications>Utilities folder) and display CPU Usage, you will see a meter with twice the number of columns as actual physical cores if your CPU(s) support hyper-threading.
TechTool Pro did that for awhile a few years ago but they fixed it. Except for hyperthreading, you don’t have twice as many cores as far as I know. DP is not going to run 8 instances of Kontakt better than 4 instances on my iMac.
Don't know what you mean Mike by the above... you agreeing or disagreeing or ?

Intel's Hyperthreading provides two virtual cores for each physical core. Per Wikipedia:
For each processor core that is physically present, the operating system addresses two virtual (logical) cores and shares the workload between them when possible. The main function of hyper-threading is to increase the number of independent instructions in the pipeline; it takes advantage of superscalar architecture, in which multiple instructions operate on separate data in parallel. With HTT, one physical core appears as two processors to the operating system, allowing concurrent scheduling of two processes per core. In addition, two or more processes can use the same resources: if resources for one process are not available, then another process can continue if its resources are available.
The magnitude of the impact of this arrangement on DAW performance is uncertain but, because the OS sees what it thinks are 12 cores, Activity Monitor shows a column in its CPU Usage window for each virtual core. i.e the CPU Usage window for my hex Mac Pro has 12 columns.
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by dreamuse »

I believe Xeon and i7's support Hyperthreading, while i5's don't. I'd have to do more research, but if there are certain duplicate registers and other context hardware in each core, it can more quickly switch between threads, etc... With this in mind, there may be more hardware yet to act like a virtual core, even if 99% of the operation's still happening with the actual core's circuitry.

Using mac's activity monitor, indeed I see 24 CPU "slots" for my dual hex machine, and per an earlier mailing, once I load the system down, the secondary slots (which I assume are the virtual cores) will start showing activity.

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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by Gravity Jim »

My Activity Monitor doesn't show a number of cores available under "CPU." It just show the names of softwares that are using or recently used the CPU.
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Re: Wondering if DP 9.51's using virtual cores

Post by HCMarkus »

Gravity Jim wrote:My Activity Monitor doesn't show a number of cores available under "CPU." It just show the names of softwares that are using or recently used the CPU.
Open the CPU Usage window Jim... find it under the "Window" menu in Activity Monitor.
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