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It looks like single core performance is still worse than i9 9900K. I wonder how this could look like when overclocked? Sadly my workflow prioritises fast core

It looks like single core performance is still worse than i9 9900K. I wonder how this could look like when overclocked? Sadly my workflow prioritises fast core over multiple cores - audio production. This workflow cannot be made parallel as one plugin depends on the output of another. If plugins can't keep up with filling the buffer you get stuttering. Single core limits you how much processing you can have on a single audio track and multiple cores how many tracks of that processing you can get. It looks like I wouldn't be able to run my chain in realtime on this new AMD even if it had 100 cores.

artimaeis 7y ago
The source mentions that this benchmark was of an early sample unit -- with a base clock of 3.9GHz and a boost clock of 4.29GHz. The final production unit is specified at base 3.5GHz and boost of 4.7GHz. I'd expect if it can sustain that boost clock with any longevity that it might come notably closer to the i9-9900k in performance.
jjeaff 7y ago
Single core performance is the only reason I chose Intel this time around. Even though I do a lot of docker and some rendering and Photoshop - most development tasks, docker builds, and even most Photoshop tasks that aren't GPU accelerated are bottlenecked on single core performance. Same goes for the overall zippiness of the OS. The most important thing for me is that whatever I am doing this moment is as fast as possible and single core performance still rules since most software still does not take advantage of multiple cores. For the next home server though, I am definitely planning on a high core count AMD. I would add though, that all the new processors are getting so fast, that the difference in single core performance is probably not noticeable. Your main issue would be long running single core tasks which are generally more likely to be multithreaded.
- piadodjanho 7y ago
  Are you sure about your Photoshop claim? I'd assume they would have rewritten most of their filters code in Halide by now.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    Not sure on multi core, but most of Photoshop is not gpu accelerated. And I think the benchmarks I have seen still out Intel ahead with Photoshop.
prennert 7y ago
Why would it not be possible to use multiple cores? Even though the plugins depend on the output of the previous one, they could sit on different cores, passing their output on from core to core. Even though that would not be parallel, being distributed, it could be faster (in some cases it might not).
- kitchenkarma 7y ago
  These cannot run at the same time as the output of one feeds into another one. Data travelling from one core to another could mean additional performance loss. Some plugins use multiple cores if whatever they calculate can be parallelised, but still the quicker it can be done the more plugins you can run in your chain.
  - saltcured 7y ago
    This is silly. A bottleneck for audio processing is a particular product's flaw, not an intrinsic challenge of audio. A modern machine capable of doing interactive, high-resolution graphics rendering or high-definition movie rendering can do a stupendous amount of audio processing without even trying. The data rates for real-time audio are so much smaller than modern memory system capabilities that we can almost ignore them. A 192 kHz, 24-bit, 6-channel audio program is less than 3 MB/s, thousands of times slower than a modern workstation CPU and memory system can muster. The stack of audio filters you describe are a natural fit for pipelined software architectures, and such architectures are trivially mapped to pipelined parallel processing models. Whatever buffer granularity one might make in a single-threaded, synchronous audio API to relay data through a sequence of filter functions can be distributed into an asynchronous pipeline, with workers on separate cores looping over a stream of input sample buffers. It just takes an SMP-style queue abstraction to handle the buffer relay between the workers, while each can invoke a typical synchronous function. Also, because these sorts of filters usually have a very consistent cost regardless of the input signal, they could be benchmarked on a given machine to plan an efficient allocation of pipeline stages to CPU cores (or to predict that the pipeline is too expensive for the given machine). Finally, audio was a domain motivating DSPs and SIMD processing long before graphics. An awful lot of audio effects ought to be easily written for a high performance SIMD processing platform, just like custom shaders in a modern video game are mapped to GPUs by the graphics driver.
coder543 7y ago
Different workloads have different IPC characteristics. A generalized benchmark like this doesn't really give any guidance on how fast a single core would be for audio processing. But, as another person mentioned, this benchmark wasn't run at the full boost clock for the 3950X, assuming this isn't a faked result entirely. Please excuse my lack of experience with audio processing, but... What you're describing about the output of one plugin being fed into the input of another is analogous to unix shell scripts piping data between processes. It actually does allow parallelization, because the first stage can be working on generating more data while the second stage is processing the data that was already generated, and the third stage is able to also be processing data that was previously generated by the second stage. Beyond that, if you have multiple audio streams, it seems like each one would have their own instances of the plugins. So, if you had 3 streams of audio, with 4 different plugins being applied to each stream, you would have at least 12 parallel threads of processing... assuming the software was written to take advantage of multiple cores. If the software is literally just single threaded, there's nothing to be done but to either accept that limitation or find alternative software. EDIT: AMD claims that their benchmarks show that the 3900X is faster at Cinebench single threaded than the Intel 9900K. (https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14525/COMPUTEX_KEYNOTE_DRAFT_FOR_PREBRIEF.26.05.19-page-035b_575px.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14525/COMPUTEX_KEYNOTE_DRA...) The 3950X has a higher boost clock, so it should be even faster. I really think you should really wait until you see audio processing benchmarks before making dramatic claims like "It looks like I wouldn't be able to run my chain in realtime on this new AMD" based on a -3% difference in performance on a leaked benchmark of a processor that isn't even running at the full clockspeed. How can you be so sure that a 3% difference would actually prevent you from running your "chain" in realtime? But, based on the evidence available, the chip should do 9% better than the recorded result here (4.7GHz actual boost divided by 4.3GHz boost used in the benchmark), reversing the situation and making the Intel chip slower. Suddenly the Intel chip is inadequate?! No, I really don't think so. Even though Zen 2 seems like it will be better, I feel more confident that even a slower chip like the 9900K would be perfectly fine for audio processing.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Yes it seems like the complexity of plugins you could run during realtime playback would scale with the number of cores, but so would the latency?
lhl 7y ago
We'll need to wait a few more weeks for third party benchmarks, but one of the big deals is that Zen 2 has matched Intel's IPC even on single core performance now: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitecture-analysis-ryzen-3000-and-epyc-rome/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitec... The numbers provided by AMD are supposedly benched before 1903 Windows scheduler updates (for CCX aware process threading, much faster clock ramping, etc) and without the latest Intel security mitigations, so it's possible that real world numbers might be even better: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitecture-analysis-ryzen-3000-and-epyc-rome/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitec... Besides the massive L3 cache, Zen 2 now supports very fast RAM overclocking on part w/ Intel platforms (DDR4 3600 OOTB, air-cooled 4200+, and 5K+ on highend motherboards - a huge improvement considering how finicky Zen, and even Zen+ was) and also a huge FPU bump (including single-cycle AVX2) but I think for full details, again we'll be waiting either for July or later for AMD's Hot Chips presentation. Every workload will be different, but considering AMD's node, efficiency, and security advantages, I wouldn't take it for granted anymore that Intel will have a lead even for single-core perf (especially once thermals come into play).
ricardobeat 7y ago
What kind of workflow requires so much power? I haven’t touched audio in a while, but back in 2012 I could already comfortably run layers upon layers of processing per track, I would have imagined any current processor is more than up to the task.
- kitchenkarma 7y ago
  I am struggling with i9 9900k running @ 5.1GHz. Plugins that process signal with extreme accuracy require a lot of power. It's like with game - your PC probably wouldn't struggle with running many instances of Solitaire, but multiple instances of GTA V with ultra details could be problematic.
  - ricardobeat 7y ago
    Can you share what kind of plugins? Is it music production? I recently got a 6-core Mini thinking it would be overpowered for Logic Pro X... now I'm worried.
    - kitchenkarma 7y ago
      For example, recently released IK Multimedia T Racks Tape Machine collection. One instance of the plugin takes about 15% of one core. In a large project this is a lot and you need to think where to use it or use freezing. Then you have a suite of plugins by Acustica that use a variant of dynamic convolution (volterra kernels) to simulate equalizers, compressors or reverbs. Virtual synthesizers like Diva in pristine mode and enabled multi core can also take a lot of resources. You really need to budget what to use where so that it won't break up - which is a skill in itself, that hopefully in the future won't be relevant as much.
      - kossae 7y ago
        > You really need to budget what to use where so that it won't break up - which is a skill in itself, that hopefully in the future won't be relevant as much. I totally agree with this. I can't stand having a resource limit on creativity when I'm making music. What's worse, is even if you get dedicated hardware (DSP chips, etc.) they are normally designed for specific software, and aren't (and likely can't be) a 'global accelerator' for all audio plugins, regardless of the developer.

artimaeis 7y ago

The source mentions that this benchmark was of an early sample unit -- with a base clock of 3.9GHz and a boost clock of 4.29GHz. The final production unit is specified at base 3.5GHz and boost of 4.7GHz. I'd expect if it can sustain that boost clock with any longevity that it might come notably closer to the i9-9900k in performance.

jjeaff 7y ago

Single core performance is the only reason I chose Intel this time around. Even though I do a lot of docker and some rendering and Photoshop - most development tasks, docker builds, and even most Photoshop tasks that aren't GPU accelerated are bottlenecked on single core performance. Same goes for the overall zippiness of the OS. The most important thing for me is that whatever I am doing this moment is as fast as possible and single core performance still rules since most software still does not take advantage of multiple cores. For the next home server though, I am definitely planning on a high core count AMD. I would add though, that all the new processors are getting so fast, that the difference in single core performance is probably not noticeable. Your main issue would be long running single core tasks which are generally more likely to be multithreaded.

piadodjanho 7y ago
Are you sure about your Photoshop claim? I'd assume they would have rewritten most of their filters code in Halide by now.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Not sure on multi core, but most of Photoshop is not gpu accelerated. And I think the benchmarks I have seen still out Intel ahead with Photoshop.

prennert 7y ago

Why would it not be possible to use multiple cores? Even though the plugins depend on the output of the previous one, they could sit on different cores, passing their output on from core to core. Even though that would not be parallel, being distributed, it could be faster (in some cases it might not).

kitchenkarma 7y ago
These cannot run at the same time as the output of one feeds into another one. Data travelling from one core to another could mean additional performance loss. Some plugins use multiple cores if whatever they calculate can be parallelised, but still the quicker it can be done the more plugins you can run in your chain.
- saltcured 7y ago
  This is silly. A bottleneck for audio processing is a particular product's flaw, not an intrinsic challenge of audio. A modern machine capable of doing interactive, high-resolution graphics rendering or high-definition movie rendering can do a stupendous amount of audio processing without even trying. The data rates for real-time audio are so much smaller than modern memory system capabilities that we can almost ignore them. A 192 kHz, 24-bit, 6-channel audio program is less than 3 MB/s, thousands of times slower than a modern workstation CPU and memory system can muster. The stack of audio filters you describe are a natural fit for pipelined software architectures, and such architectures are trivially mapped to pipelined parallel processing models. Whatever buffer granularity one might make in a single-threaded, synchronous audio API to relay data through a sequence of filter functions can be distributed into an asynchronous pipeline, with workers on separate cores looping over a stream of input sample buffers. It just takes an SMP-style queue abstraction to handle the buffer relay between the workers, while each can invoke a typical synchronous function. Also, because these sorts of filters usually have a very consistent cost regardless of the input signal, they could be benchmarked on a given machine to plan an efficient allocation of pipeline stages to CPU cores (or to predict that the pipeline is too expensive for the given machine). Finally, audio was a domain motivating DSPs and SIMD processing long before graphics. An awful lot of audio effects ought to be easily written for a high performance SIMD processing platform, just like custom shaders in a modern video game are mapped to GPUs by the graphics driver.

coder543 7y ago

Different workloads have different IPC characteristics. A generalized benchmark like this doesn't really give any guidance on how fast a single core would be for audio processing. But, as another person mentioned, this benchmark wasn't run at the full boost clock for the 3950X, assuming this isn't a faked result entirely. Please excuse my lack of experience with audio processing, but... What you're describing about the output of one plugin being fed into the input of another is analogous to unix shell scripts piping data between processes. It actually does allow parallelization, because the first stage can be working on generating more data while the second stage is processing the data that was already generated, and the third stage is able to also be processing data that was previously generated by the second stage. Beyond that, if you have multiple audio streams, it seems like each one would have their own instances of the plugins. So, if you had 3 streams of audio, with 4 different plugins being applied to each stream, you would have at least 12 parallel threads of processing... assuming the software was written to take advantage of multiple cores. If the software is literally just single threaded, there's nothing to be done but to either accept that limitation or find alternative software. EDIT: AMD claims that their benchmarks show that the 3900X is faster at Cinebench single threaded than the Intel 9900K. (https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14525/COMPUTEX_KEYNOTE_DRAFT_FOR_PREBRIEF.26.05.19-page-035b_575px.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14525/COMPUTEX_KEYNOTE_DRA...) The 3950X has a higher boost clock, so it should be even faster. I really think you should really wait until you see audio processing benchmarks before making dramatic claims like "It looks like I wouldn't be able to run my chain in realtime on this new AMD" based on a -3% difference in performance on a leaked benchmark of a processor that isn't even running at the full clockspeed. How can you be so sure that a 3% difference would actually prevent you from running your "chain" in realtime? But, based on the evidence available, the chip should do 9% better than the recorded result here (4.7GHz actual boost divided by 4.3GHz boost used in the benchmark), reversing the situation and making the Intel chip slower. Suddenly the Intel chip is inadequate?! No, I really don't think so. Even though Zen 2 seems like it will be better, I feel more confident that even a slower chip like the 9900K would be perfectly fine for audio processing.

ubercow13 7y ago
Yes it seems like the complexity of plugins you could run during realtime playback would scale with the number of cores, but so would the latency?

lhl 7y ago

We'll need to wait a few more weeks for third party benchmarks, but one of the big deals is that Zen 2 has matched Intel's IPC even on single core performance now: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitecture-analysis-ryzen-3000-and-epyc-rome/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitec... The numbers provided by AMD are supposedly benched before 1903 Windows scheduler updates (for CCX aware process threading, much faster clock ramping, etc) and without the latest Intel security mitigations, so it's possible that real world numbers might be even better: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitecture-analysis-ryzen-3000-and-epyc-rome/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitec... Besides the massive L3 cache, Zen 2 now supports very fast RAM overclocking on part w/ Intel platforms (DDR4 3600 OOTB, air-cooled 4200+, and 5K+ on highend motherboards - a huge improvement considering how finicky Zen, and even Zen+ was) and also a huge FPU bump (including single-cycle AVX2) but I think for full details, again we'll be waiting either for July or later for AMD's Hot Chips presentation. Every workload will be different, but considering AMD's node, efficiency, and security advantages, I wouldn't take it for granted anymore that Intel will have a lead even for single-core perf (especially once thermals come into play).

ricardobeat 7y ago

What kind of workflow requires so much power? I haven’t touched audio in a while, but back in 2012 I could already comfortably run layers upon layers of processing per track, I would have imagined any current processor is more than up to the task.

kitchenkarma 7y ago
I am struggling with i9 9900k running @ 5.1GHz. Plugins that process signal with extreme accuracy require a lot of power. It's like with game - your PC probably wouldn't struggle with running many instances of Solitaire, but multiple instances of GTA V with ultra details could be problematic.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  Can you share what kind of plugins? Is it music production? I recently got a 6-core Mini thinking it would be overpowered for Logic Pro X... now I'm worried.
  - kitchenkarma 7y ago
    For example, recently released IK Multimedia T Racks Tape Machine collection. One instance of the plugin takes about 15% of one core. In a large project this is a lot and you need to think where to use it or use freezing. Then you have a suite of plugins by Acustica that use a variant of dynamic convolution (volterra kernels) to simulate equalizers, compressors or reverbs. Virtual synthesizers like Diva in pristine mode and enabled multi core can also take a lot of resources. You really need to budget what to use where so that it won't break up - which is a skill in itself, that hopefully in the future won't be relevant as much.
    - kossae 7y ago
      > You really need to budget what to use where so that it won't break up - which is a skill in itself, that hopefully in the future won't be relevant as much. I totally agree with this. I can't stand having a resource limit on creativity when I'm making music. What's worse, is even if you get dedicated hardware (DSP chips, etc.) they are normally designed for specific software, and aren't (and likely can't be) a 'global accelerator' for all audio plugins, regardless of the developer.