[PD] Pd performance relationship to CPU model

Roman Haefeli reduzent at gmail.com
Thu Mar 12 16:25:34 CET 2015


Hi all

I've been using Pd and having netpd sessions on my 8 year old Laptop
happily ever since. Recently, I was doing a session on my much newer (1
year old) work computer and I was hitting the CPU limit much quicker
than I'd expected. I booted my old laptop and loaded the session there
and the Pd load on a core was around 55%. The old laptop has Core 2 Duo
T8300 (2.4GHz) CPU, the newer one a i5-3427U (1.8GHz) CPU. Admittedly,
the newer model goes under 'ultrabook' while the old one is a classic
old-school quite heavy laptop. Still, I'm surprised to see that the
per-Core performance has _decreased_ over the time. It seems that
(mobile) CPU development is focused on "more cores" and "less power" and
less on "more performance per core". Which is probably a good thing in
general, but not quite what would benefit Pd.

Now, what should I do when my beloved thinkpad dies? Asking naively: Do
I need to buy another ugly|bulky|heavy laptop to get the performance I
got used to? A thing I'm wondering about is that a CPU benchmarking
website [1] lists for the i5-3427U a single thread rating of 1435 and
for the T8300 a rating of 934. So, according to this benchmark, the
newer model is supposed to be faster, even when running single-threaded
applications. Obviously, benchmark results most likely depend on the
type of test load and running many Pd patches is a different kind of
load from what was used to do the benchmarking. Maybe I'm asking naive
questions, but are there CPU models known to be good for DSP-like
workloads? Would Pd's performance benefit from those? How can one
identify "good" models? What happened to the "newer = faster" rule?


[1] http://www.cpubenchmark.net

Roman

  




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