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12 core, 8 core, 4 core oh my!
I would love to see a Top 10 list of popular software and the amount of cores they can use.
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16 Replies
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In fact, since Grand Central has made its entrance in Mac OS, all software using it would use all available cores, or whichever cores GC deems are necessary and available. Most serious software used in media production has been updated to do so. Most, but not all…
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
[Jean-Christophe Boulay] “In fact, since Grand Central has made its entrance in Mac OS, all software using it would use all available cores, or whichever cores GC deems are necessary and available. Most serious software used in media production has been updated to do so. Most, but not all…”
Like Final Cut Pro, which is still single-threaded and 32-bit.
Are any major apps using Grand Central yet? I can think of plenty of multi-threaded applications, but no Grand Central-enabled apps.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Yeap, most of the new power apps (CS5 and DaVinci) are being written to take advantage of high end NVidia cards and more RAM.
I’m sure when the next set of Apple Pro apps comes out we will see a huge increase is power. (Let’s hope so). It is funny that you really don’t hear anything about Grand Central or OpenCL.
Compressor is the one app that will take all the processors and use them as virtual cluster. Then a new app from Magic Bullet (Grinder) uses a separate core for each clip in the queue, so it would process 12 clips at the same time.
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[Michael Sacci] “Yeap, most of the new power apps (CS5 and DaVinci) are being written to take advantage of high end NVidia cards and more RAM”
This is a great point. Parallel computing is way more than just CPU cores — and NVIDIA’s CUDA technology has huge cross-industry momentum.
After Effects has been able to use multiple cores since CS3, but the RAM requirements for effective multiprocessing are steep — 2-4 GB of RAM per core for CS3 and CS4 (32-bit), with the option of using more than 4 GB/core with CS5 (64-bit).
Most 3D programs use bucket renderers, which can break a single frame into chunks and distribute processing across multiple threads on multiple CPUs.
To come back Blake’s original question from another angle, are there any apps in particular whose multi-core performance you’re curious about?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Well… yeah… there is the fact that Apple’s own app which would most benefit from GC doesn’t use it…
Like many apps, the current FCP is built on some very old foundations which make this kind of thing trickier. The rumour mill talks about FCP foundations being renewed for the next version, so GC support would be expected there.
In fact, researching further, it’s true that very few companies talk about GC support. I’d heard CS5 took advantage of it but can’t find a clear reference to it in the release notes. When using CS5 at a friend’s studio, his iStats showed all 8 cores sharing the load, though… Do developers have to specifically integrate GC or does the OS take over the duties on its own? A question for the developers…
I’ll report back if I find a concrete answer to that.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
[Jean-Christophe Boulay] “Do developers have to specifically integrate GC or does the OS take over the duties on its own? A question for the developers… I’ll report back if I find a concrete answer to that.”
Developers must implement it. See the Wikipedia article on GCD for more.
I don’t know if this will see wide adoption in our industry, outside of Apple. Many other apps — like CS5 — are cross-platform, so it’d be extra work and complication to code for Grand Central on the Mac platform only. I’d wager these developers will probably choose to continue managing their own threads instead of allowing Grand Central to do it for them.
Grand Central makes it easier to leverage multiple cores, but it isn’t essential.
[Jean-Christophe Boulay] “Like many apps, the current FCP is built on some very old foundations which make this kind of thing trickier. The rumour mill talks about FCP foundations being renewed for the next version, so GC support would be expected there.”
I was hoping for this in FCP7, but since we’ve all heard that the next release of FCP will be awesome, perhaps it will finally be 64-bit and multi-threaded.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
I’m trying to determine which core amount is of value to me.
My primary tools are Final Cut Pro & Compressor, (using XDCAM footage). Also, On2 Flix Pro for rendering into FLV’s
The slowest is: FCP rendering uncompressed Quicktimes. Those Quicktimes then go into Compressor for reformating, then into On2 for FLV’sSo Software that’s important to me every day is:
FCP
Compressor
Photoshop
After EffectsI’m still using my trusty (but slow) Dual G5
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[Blake Porter] “I’m trying to determine which core amount is of value to me.
So Software that’s important to me every day is:
FCP
Compressor
Photoshop
After Effects”Compressor and After Effects can both use however many cores you can throw at them, provided you have loads of RAM.
In my workflows, Photoshop is always more RAM-intensive than CPU-intensive.
FCP is the only app here that is currently limited to 32-bit (meaning it can only access up to 4 GB of RAM), and single-threaded (meaning it doesn’t benefit from multiple cores). As Jean-Christophe mentioned, this is expected to change soon.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Thanks. Applications vs cores vs RAM vs Processors would make a complex, but useful flow chart.
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When deciding on what to buy here what I keep in mind.
First question I ask is, do I need it now? If it will not pay for itself within 6 months I don’t buy. I upgrade systems about every 4 years, my current is 8-core 2.1 MacPro, so it is starting to show its age. I cannot upgrade graphic cards to take full advantage of the new CS5 and others. But it is still a great system and I do fine. If I needed speed more than I do money I would start looking. Right now I can wait a little longer on a render or encode.
When I do buy I normally get the most processors, but the second from the top speed. For me this is a good compromise and I feel giving up a little speed for a big savings is okay. I get the more processor over more RAM cause I can always upgrade memory later on. (I never buy memory from Apple, get if from Macsales for about a 1/4 the price).
The other thing is the graphic card, unfortunately Apple is on the ATI side and Adobe and Black Magic are on the NVidia side. If Color was not in your workflow I would probably get a high end NVidia card.
Just my 2 cents.
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