The DAW components page still lists 6 cores as the recommended limit for Intel PC CPUs while on the Mac or AMD Opteron platforms, 4 to 12 cores are supported. We are on the cusp of availability of 8 core Xeons and later this year Ivy Bridge 8 cores will start appearing. The performance of a single E5-2670 8-core Xeon over the current 3960X Sandy Bridge-E 6-core is dramatic. And it’s only about 1/3 more expensive. But it seems that Xeons don’t scale as well to low latency I/O operation, completely losing their processing advantages at extreme low latencies, so the future Ivy Bridge CPUs look like better candidates.
This post might be a bit pre-emptive, but is Nuendo in its current form ready to take advantage of an Intel 8-core system? There have been issues in the past when moving to larger core numbers: is it recommended to wait until these are tested or is the groundwork already done to support more CPU cores than 6?
not sure i would agree with that comment at all. but i can see where it could be made.
Dual Xeon motherboards tend to not be audio freindly, however with the right board its not more or less likely do not be able to do low latency vs a single processor board.
assuming all things work and windows/bios tweaks have been done. and the dual Xeons are of equal GHz to the single then the dual technically will be able to handle lower latency of very large projects.