Hi. I’m planning to purchase a new PC for my audio projects. In relation to the CPU, I,m wondering wether it´s better to have more cores or more single core clock speed. I work with Ardour 6.7, ubuntu studio 20.04, and usually working with 20/30 audio tracks, with 30/40 processors plugins. My intention is to add some MIDI tracks for drums and keyboards, using DrumGizmo, CollaB3 or something of the sort, and SF2/SFZ players, no more than 3 MIDI instruments on each project.
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance
There’s never a simple answer to such questions.
The overview is this: more cores will give more parallelism which will give you more tracks (we run tracks in parallel). More CPU speed will give you more DSP power, so you can use more or more CPU-costly plugins.
The problem is, more CPU speed can also allow you to use more tracks, and more CPU cores will also give you more DSP power.
Personally I would tend to lean towards more cores than more CPU speed at this point in time mostly because the multipliers are so different: a “faster” CPU is not going to be that much faster than a “slower” CPU in 2021, whereas 16 cores (or even 32) is 4x more cores than a 4 core machine.
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Thanks, Paul. I have a doubt between the intel core i5 11600K 3,9 Ghz 12Mb, witch is a 11th gen 6-core CPU, and the intel core i7 10700k 3,8 Ghz 16Mb, witch has 8 cores but is of a previous generation, the 10th. The later only supports DDR4 2933 and is more expensive. I wonder if a newer generation cpu would be better, even if it is a slighty lower range.
Personally I am holding out on replacing my audio machine until DDR5 support and the latest PCIe support is more ubiquitous, but if you were buying now I think AMD processors win over team Blue’s equivalent chips.
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