Me, Or North Korea?
Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2016 5:53 am
So OWC had an end-of-the-year RAM sale, and due to a slight misunderstanding about the number of available slots in my Mac Pro, I now have (pause for effect) 40 Gigabytes of RAM. (I had slots left over, and compatible chips, so I figured, 'why not?') Memory Manager did its thing, and assured me the configuration is optimal, (8G chips in slots 1,2, 5 and 6, 2Gs in the rest) so I spent the afternoon loading up instances of Kontakt with all my biggest instruments and multis. The DAW's operating at a latency near the theoretical limit and the machine has not broken a sweat, though I haven't yet piled on the streams and plugins. In any case, it's almost certainly overkill; I'm just trying to determine by how much. At saner latency settings, I expect Tracktion will yield somewhere between 128 and 256 streams, (numbers freshly pulled from an unfresh place, where the sun don't shine) and Logic? IIRC, it allocates memory dynamically, and is built to take advantage of hyperthreading, so the equivalent of 24 processor cores would earn 1.666G per core, kinda lean, when you think of it that way, but of course nothing's as simple as that; cache, OS overhead, disk performance and bus speed figure in, as well. Testing continues, 'til we know who has more firepower.