The Logic Off Topic list

Please, no mac-bashing arguments/platform wars ... this is just for 
information
------------------
Apple unveiled it's new line of G4 PowerMacs today that includes a 
dual 1.25 GHz model with a combined performance of 18 GigaFlops (18 
billion floating point operations per second). This model also 
includes a 2 MB L3 cache at 500 MHz, a 267 MHz direct PCI bus and 2 
separate ATA busses that include the ability to run 2 hard drives on 
the ATA100 bus and 2 on the ATA 66 bus.

-----------------
Apple ranked number one in customer support
Thu Aug 8, 2:57 PM ET

by Jim Dalrymple, jdalrymple@...

Consumer Reports recently conducted a survey of its subscribers 
rating customer satisfaction with repairs and getting help from 
computer hardware companies. Of the five companies in the survey, 
Apple ranked number one among Consumer Reports customers.


According to the report, five percent of customers purchased a 
computer that was inoperable within the first month; a further 11 
percent said they had problems in the first month but the computer 
was usable.

Consumer Reports asked 4,600 subscribers to tell them about recent 
experiences trying to get help from a manufacturer's 
technical-support service. The report rated each company on the 
following criteria: Solved the problem; Support Staff; Waiting on the 
phone; Web support; and email support.

Among the companies surveyed for the report including Apple, Dell, 
Gateway, HP and Compaq, only Apple scored better than average in 
every category that they offered services.

"Except for Apple, satisfaction scores were somewhat lower across the 
board, which appears to reflect changes throughout the industry." 
noted the report.

TazmnianDv@... wrote:

>Apple unveiled it's new line of G4 PowerMacs today that includes a 
>dual 1.25 GHz model with a combined performance of 18 GigaFlops (18 
>billion floating point operations per second). This model also 
>includes a 2 MB L3 cache at 500 MHz, a 267 MHz direct PCI bus and 2 
>separate ATA busses that include the ability to run 2 hard drives on 
>the ATA100 bus and 2 on the ATA 66 bus.

The most significant improvement with regard to running Logic on these new
machines would seem to be the improvement in the memory bandwidth -- now it
is claimed as 2.7 GB/sec -- similar memory bandwidth potential to a P4 with
333 DDR on a 845 G chipset. 

These machines should run more plugin instances than the 25% speed bump at
the high end would indicate. The system overhead of running Logic on OSX
compared to System 9.2 is something only Emagic and maybe the beta-testers
will know about. 

Regards,
Murray

>The most significant improvement with regard to running Logic on these
>new
>machines would seem to be the improvement in the memory bandwidth

- faster bus
- faster type of RAM
- faster processor
- Nvida graphics board on entry level powermac
- dual processors on the entire line

At 09:43 PM 13/08/02 -0400, you wrote:
>>The most significant improvement with regard to running Logic on these
>>new
>>machines would seem to be the improvement in the memory bandwidth
>
>- faster bus
>- faster type of RAM

The FSB speed change and the RAM change boil down to the same thing -- DDR
RAM instead of SDRAM. Now the G4 has a similar FSB/memory to the Athlon XP
and the P4 with DDR. P4 with RDRAM is still the fastest memory interface
but RDRAM is still expensive. The most significant improvement is that the
memory bandwidth has gone up by 150% to 2.7 GB/sec. PCI bus is still at the
desktop standard -- 32 bits wide and 33 Mhz. 

>- faster processor
25% faster at the high end

>- Nvida graphics board on entry level powermac

Logic places low demands on graphics systems so state of the art 3D is nice
but irrelevant to Logic. 

>- dual processors on the entire line

Neither of these last two changes will make a big improvement in Logic
performance on System 9.2. When Logic runs on 10.2 we will be able to see
what the benefits of dual processing on that platform for Logic users. 

Regards,
Murray

Iwrote:
>At 09:43 PM 13/08/02 -0400, you wrote:
>>>The most significant improvement with regard to running Logic on these
>>>new
>>>machines would seem to be the improvement in the memory bandwidth
>>
>>- faster bus
>>- faster type of RAM
>
>The FSB speed change and the RAM change boil down to the same thing -- DDR
>RAM instead of SDRAM. Now the G4 has a similar FSB/memory to the Athlon XP
>and the P4 with DDR. P4 with RDRAM is still the fastest memory interface
>but RDRAM is still expensive. The most significant improvement is that the
>memory bandwidth has gone up by 150% to 2.7 GB/sec. 

Oops! -- I credited Apple with providing the memory interface on the CPU to
use all this extra bandwidth.
At http://mosr.com/ they are saying it ain't so:

> The new 1.25GHz chips are, unfortunately, just upclocked PowerPC 7455 
>processors, not the PPC 7470s hoped for by the grapevine. This is a 
>dangerous flaw, because the PPC 7455 cannot take advantage of DDR memory -- 
>as on the Xserve, the new PowerMacs will be limited to 1.3GB/s actual 
>processor bandwidth despite 2.7GB/s memory bandwidth on the two high-end 
>models.

NVidia Nforce chipsets for the Athlon do something vaguely comparable. They
have dual 2.1GB/sec buses to DDR giving "in theory" 4.2 GB/sec memory
bandwidth. Trouble is,  the Athlon XP CPU to memory interface can only deal
with 2.1 GB/sec of data. If NVidia go ahead and make dual Athlon chipsets
(as they are rumoured to be doing soon) the dual banks of DDR will actually
confer some advantage. Intel will offer Dual DDR for P4 with the GraniteBay
chipset later this year. 

Regards,
Murray

I have an old graphics board, but I wonder if the Logic screenset changes 
wouldn't speed up with a newer graphics board? (Especially for dual monitors).

TazmnianDv@... wrote:
>I have an old graphics board, but I wonder if the Logic screenset changes 
>wouldn't speed up with a newer graphics board? (Especially for dual monitors).

The latest NVidia's and ATI cards are very fast at 3D (heaps of tests on
the PC hardware sites) compared to everything else available and as good or
better at 2D which is what we deal with in Logic. 

My guess is that it would be some combination of CPU speed and 2D graphics
performance of the adapter that would determine how quickly the switch of
screens happened. You can see the role of the CPU when you run a song which
really loads the CPU -- graphical operations really slow down. This is
where the Dual Processor helps in DP Macs -- one CPU is always ready for
graphics tasks even if most of its performance is going begging -- ie not
available for plugs except on input objects. 

Nevertheless the latest card would proabably have to help to some degree. 

Regards,
Murray

>> - dual processors on the entire line
> 
> Neither of these last two changes will make a big improvement in Logic
> performance on System 9.2. When Logic runs on 10.2 we will be able to see
> what the benefits of dual processing on that platform for Logic users.
> 
> Regards,
> Murray

You obviously don't have a dual processor mac. I for one could bot bare the
thought of usng a single processor model for logic. Especially now on 9.2.2
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Matt McKenzie-Smith
PO Box 10395
Adelaide BC 5000 
South Australia

+618(0)82938282
+61(0)416 197 883
mattrixx@...

Matt wrote:
>>> - dual processors on the entire line
>> 
>> Neither of these last two changes will make a big improvement in Logic
>> performance on System 9.2. When Logic runs on 10.2 we will be able to see
>> what the benefits of dual processing on that platform for Logic users.

>You obviously don't have a dual processor mac. I for one could bot bare the
>thought of usng a single processor model for logic. Especially now on 9.2.2

Hi Matt,

I think we aren't at odds here at all.

I was just comparing the likely impact of the various changes. It seemed at
the time I wrote the above that a 150% increase in memory bandwidth would
be the biggest improvement. That's all I was saying. 

Now reports at  http://mosr.com/ indicate that the CPU can't exploit this
bandwidth anyway. 
Bit of a bummer I would have thought. 

You are quite right about dual procs I am sure. By all reports dual
processors  have benefits in Logic -- snappy graphics updates and general
responsiveness are better than that observed with a single processor  of
the same speed when the Audio system is fully loaded. PC users were waiting
for Logic on WinXP/2000 to support dual processing for the same reasons. 

However,  when trying to evaluate what the impact of the new Mac models is,
the offer of dual processors is not new  -- you can already get them. The
price point where they kick may well be lower.  

Perhaps the report card should read:
 
"Could do better" 

If you want some light entertainment read the link below. I don't think the
recently unveiled new models are quite what these guys had in mind when
they were prognosticating late last year. 

Enjoy:

http://www.architosh.com/news/2001-11/2001a-1130-appleg5.phtml

Regards,
Murray

>However,  when trying to evaluate what the impact of the new Mac models
>is,
>the offer of dual processors is not new  -- you can already get them. The
>price point where they kick may well be lower.  

Actually one of the "apple genuius" spilled the beans, that in order to get 
dual processors at a low price, they had to make some compromises. So an 
older dual-1-gig may actually be better than a new dual-1-gig.

> Hi Matt,
> 
> I think we aren't at odds here at all.
> 
> I was just comparing the likely impact of the various changes. It seemed at
> the time I wrote the above that a 150% increase in memory bandwidth would
> be the biggest improvement. That's all I was saying.
> 
> Now reports at  http://mosr.com/ indicate that the CPU can't exploit this
> bandwidth anyway.
> Bit of a bummer I would have thought.
> 
> You are quite right about dual procs I am sure. By all reports dual
> processors  have benefits in Logic -- snappy graphics updates and general
> responsiveness are better than that observed with a single processor  of
> the same speed when the Audio system is fully loaded. PC users were waiting
> for Logic on WinXP/2000 to support dual processing for the same reasons.
> 
> However,  when trying to evaluate what the impact of the new Mac models is,
> the offer of dual processors is not new  -- you can already get them. The
> price point where they kick may well be lower.
> 
> Perhaps the report card should read:
> 
> "Could do better"
> 
> If you want some light entertainment read the link below. I don't think the
> recently unveiled new models are quite what these guys had in mind when
> they were prognosticating late last year.
> 
> Enjoy:
> 
> http://www.architosh.com/news/2001-11/2001a-1130-appleg5.phtml
> 
> Regards,
> Murray

No worries Murray ;-)
It was interesting also that the DDR implementation/bus speed issue seemed
to represent half of its potential, and my first thought (which seems to be
have been squashed) was that it may have had something to do with two
processors using the bandwidth. I think you would know what i might be
getting at here.....multiplexing type of thang......... But it appears not
to be the case. (I don't know the techy details of what I am trying to
describe)
I'm rambling now.....
Cheers


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Matt McKenzie-Smith
PO Box 10395
Adelaide BC 5000 
South Australia

+618(0)82938282
+61(0)416 197 883
mattrixx@...

Matt wrote:

>It was interesting also that the DDR implementation/bus speed issue seemed
>to represent half of its potential, and my first thought (which seems to be
>have been squashed) was that it may have had something to do with two
>processors using the bandwidth. I think you would know what i might be
>getting at here.....multiplexing type of thang......... But it appears not
>to be the case. (I don't know the techy details of what I am trying to
>describe)

I get what you mean I think:  two processors each able to exploit 40 or 50%
of the available memory bandwidth (say 1 GB/sec each) sharing the available
memory bandwidth (2.7 GB/sec).  

Regards,
Murray

You guys still don't understand the impact of OS X. You can't compare dual
processors under OS 9 and OS X since one is the old Mac OS and the other has
a UNIX kernel and is multithreaded to take full advantage of both processors
dynamically. My understanding is that there is almost a doubling of power
using two processors as long as OS X is being used. We will have to wait for
Logic 5 OS X to find out if this is really the case.

Regards

Paul Nicholls

> From: Murray McDowall <murraymc@...>
> Reply-To: logic-ot@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 20:37:53 +1000
> To: logic-ot@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [L-OT] Re: New Macs / #1 Customer Support
> 
> Matt wrote:
>>>> - dual processors on the entire line
>>> 
>>> Neither of these last two changes will make a big improvement in Logic
>>> performance on System 9.2. When Logic runs on 10.2 we will be able to see
>>> what the benefits of dual processing on that platform for Logic users.
> 
>> You obviously don't have a dual processor mac. I for one could bot bare the
>> thought of usng a single processor model for logic. Especially now on 9.2.2
> 
> Hi Matt,
> 
> I think we aren't at odds here at all.
> 
> I was just comparing the likely impact of the various changes. It seemed at
> the time I wrote the above that a 150% increase in memory bandwidth would
> be the biggest improvement. That's all I was saying.
> 
> Now reports at  http://mosr.com/ indicate that the CPU can't exploit this
> bandwidth anyway.
> Bit of a bummer I would have thought.
> 
> You are quite right about dual procs I am sure. By all reports dual
> processors  have benefits in Logic -- snappy graphics updates and general
> responsiveness are better than that observed with a single processor  of
> the same speed when the Audio system is fully loaded. PC users were waiting
> for Logic on WinXP/2000 to support dual processing for the same reasons.
> 
> However,  when trying to evaluate what the impact of the new Mac models is,
> the offer of dual processors is not new  -- you can already get them. The
> price point where they kick may well be lower.
> 
> Perhaps the report card should read:
> 
> "Could do better"
> 
> If you want some light entertainment read the link below. I don't think the
> recently unveiled new models are quite what these guys had in mind when
> they were prognosticating late last year.
> 
> Enjoy:
> 
> http://www.architosh.com/news/2001-11/2001a-1130-appleg5.phtml
> 
> Regards,
> Murray
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
> 
>

Paul Nicholls wrote:
>You guys still don't understand the impact of OS X. You can't compare dual
>processors under OS 9 and OS X since one is the old Mac OS and the other has
>a UNIX kernel and is multithreaded to take full advantage of both processors
>dynamically. My understanding is that there is almost a doubling of power
>using two processors as long as OS X is being used. 

Not a chance of that I am afraid. 

The current system uses one processor for audio and the other for
everything else including some audio stuff on input objects.  If the
non-audio processor is currently under-utilised that is where the potential
for gained efficiency is and since it is currently not at 0% -- probably
far from it in Logic -- doubling of power is again not possible. 

This is not taking into consideration the OS overheads connected with
running and syncing operations on two processors and managing their sharing
of memory and I/O  or considering the issue of dependencies between
operations on the separate processors. For example, you can't calculate the
output of a bus reverb one one processor until you have all the audio that
will be fed to that bus. If this audio includes the output of
audioinstruments which are running on the other processor you have a
dependency. Byte Magazine and other online IT publications would have
articles which explain the intricacies of all this. 

>We will have to wait for
>Logic 5 OS X to find out if this is really the case.

I agree.  

It is quite likely that OSX will, with all its new features,  impose
heavier processor and memory overheads than current OS 9.X. It may well
provide better MP support but it will also consume resources -- probably
more than 0S 9.2 . I haven't read reports on the efficiency of 10.2 yet but
prior versions of OSX have been criticised in the Mac press for being
slower than OS 9.2 on a lot of things. I would be surprised if that changed
completely -- all that eye candy comes at a price too. 

Regards,
Murray

Murray Wrote:

>The current system uses one processor for audio and the other for
>everything else including some audio stuff on input objects.  If the
>non-audio processor is currently under-utilised that is where the potential
>for gained efficiency is and since it is currently not at 0% -- probably
>far from it in Logic -- doubling of power is again not possible.

Absolutely right.

It bears repeating though that there are a couple of ways to trick 
logic into making the first processor to take more of the load.  Just 
use a send to an I/O out and physically route that out to an input on 
the same I/O and put the more CPU hogging effects on the environment 
input object for that input.  Effects on input objects are always 
processed by CPU #1.