Yes, I’m revisiting “that old chestnut”
I’m due for an upgrade later this year and while I’m well ahead of time I’m looking at my options.
The newly released Sandy Bridge core cpu’s are relatively low power consuming and priced reasonably… The top of the line “2600” range has Hyperthreading (or SMT). These are a similar price to the AMD 6 core processors (although consume less power so produce less heat so require less cooling).
In ardour 3 it can allocate DSP resources to multiple CPU’s/cores available however Hyperthreading appears to the OS as an additional core. Although in reality all it is doing is using wasted cycles to push through another thread on the same core.
So I’m basically concerned that Hyperthreading may confuse the issue with Ardour 3’s very clever multithreaded implementation and could potentially result in increased latency or some other unwanted result.
What is the general concensus here… Is hyperthreading likely to cause issues?
If it is, then I can buy one model down and overclock it, or I can look at an expensive cooler and go for AMD…