Multiple cores on Mac

[GlennO]

This was posted by AP in a thread about a different topic, but it sounds interesting enough to warrant a thread of its own.

@AP

@GlennO

@Steve Helstrip

I’ve noticed most people that complain about Mac performance are using old hardware (ancient in computer terms). If you need good performance, buy a modern computer. Simple, really.

That’s certainly true. However, I’m not addressing the issue about whether performance is good or bad. I’m simply doing a comparison between DAWs. When I run these tests, that’s what I’m generally interested in learning. If I changed something (a new version of Omnisphere, an update to the OS, running in a different DAW), does the performance change? And I think that’s how the performance complaints in this forum are generally expressed, when people say that performance is better in DAW X than in Cubase.

Steinberg has already posted that cubase doesn’t perform well on Mac systems with 6 core cpu’s and that 8 and 12 core newer machines don’t offer any advantage.

Mac computers 2012 to 2019 with SSD will perform about the same.

For example a 15” 4 core cpu 2012 and 2018 MBP with SSD will perform about the same.

Mutlticore CPU - cubase - Cubase - Steinberg Forums

I’m reading that thread, but I don’t see anything from Steinberg saying there is a problem. Can you direct me to the post from Steinberg you’re talking about?

[AP1]

I’m almost 100% sure that this is the post. But for some reason the statement is no longer there.

[cubace]

That link is for cubase 8. And some heavy weight plugins like kontakt can use multi core themselves.

[GlennO]

I’ve never seen a problem like the one described above, so I suspect there’s some confusion. Obviously there are diminishing returns as you add cores, but that’s true with any DAW. And cpus generally have lower clock speeds when you configure your computer with more cores, but again that’s not specific to Cubase.

Regarding Kontakt…it’s generally best to turn off multicore processing in Kontakt when using it as a plugin. That tends to conflict with the multicore processing of the DAW. It’s fine to turn that on when using Kontakt as a standalone, but turn it off when you’re using it as a plugin.