Is Hyperthreading in an i7 a problem for music production?

[Guest]

Does the whole hyperthreading virtual core set up work seamlessly with DAWs, or does it create problems when running loads of plugins in any way?

[Daniel Drummond]

Not at all. It's just great. Go ahead!

[2goodears]

Ditto. Im working with an I7-980X in one machine and an X Sandybridge in the 2nd. just have lots of ram

[mick.n]

Ditto here also.Hyperthreading on using a self build sandybridge i7 2600@ 3.40GHz. "Only" 8 gb ram as yet but can handle anything i can throw at it without breaking a sweat.

[OneWorld]

I have confusion about this hyper-threading malarky. Going back to the P4 days and other early processors. So with a P4 with hyperthreading show as 2 processors in the My Computer/Properties/Device manager?

Similarly, with Core 2 Duo, it would show as 4 processors and a Core 2 Quad as 8 processors.

An i7 is a quad processor, as I understanding it, so like with the Core 2 Quad, why bother hyperthreading anyway? after all, all that is happening is that the same core is basically being divided in two, hyper-threading is task switching and not true parallel processing?

[Guest]

Cheers everyone - an I7 it is!

[Pete Kaine]

An i7 is a quad processor, as I understanding it, so like with the Core 2 Quad, why bother hyperthreading anyway? after all, all that is happening is that the same core is basically being divided in two, hyper-threading is task switching and not true parallel processing?

Without going into it all, the bit that concerns the average user is that you get a (rough) 30% - 40% performance gain over having it turned off. So whilst your right in what you say the performance increase is a worthwhile addition.

[UltimateOutsider]

EDIT: Heh, didn't realize how old this thread was.

There has been controversy over hyperthreading as it relates to music production, because the nature of hyperthreading is such that it's theoretically possible to have a perfect storm of simultaneous threads contending for the same physical CPU resources that results in hyperthreading actually introducing a bottleneck and slightly hurting rather than helping overall performance.

However, in practice, HT has been shown to provide significant gains in DAW performance, particularly in DAWs that are HT-enabled. See the DAWBench report on the i7 920 processor (an old model), where hyperthreading resulted in a 25-30% boost in Cubase performance.

Note that application developers have the ability to restrict their software to only use physical cores. For example, Ableton Live only launches threads on a per-core basis, not per-logical-processor basis. But even in these cases, HT can still be helpful, because your OS has dozens of background processes running anyway, and these can all take advantage of the unused processing power, as needed, which can have a side-effect of boosting your overall DAW performance.

[Guest]

That's good to know - I'll be using Cubase 7