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Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

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mnailor

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Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostFri Nov 26, 2021 1:37 pm

Since my i9-9900 with 64 GB of memory needs some compromises to run bigger samplesets like Nancy, Billerbeck, and Doesburg -- both to fit in memory and to get enough polyphony out of the CPU with the best audio quality options -- I succumbed to Black Friday sales ordered a new Dell Precision 3650.

It's an i9-11900K with 128 GB. That should give about 30 - 40% more CPU capacity depending on benchmark, 20% more single core speed, and twice the memory.

I looked at the new high-end Intel gen 12 CPUs i9-12900*, but multiple fans and liquid cooling and very expensive doesn't suit me. I guess gamers have game sounds to cover up a noisy computer...

The i9-9900 PC will become my backup HW computer, and the old backup HW i7-6700 will become the household PC. And one to recycle.
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mdyde

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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostFri Nov 26, 2021 2:43 pm

Congratulations. Enjoy the new gadget!
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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mnailor

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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostFri Nov 26, 2021 5:03 pm

Thanks. I'm hoping to get it in mid-January. Supply chain yada yada yada...
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vpo-organist

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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostFri Nov 26, 2021 5:43 pm

Here is a comparing between i9-9900K, i9-11900K and i9 12900K

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/In ... 3334vs4597
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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostFri Nov 26, 2021 8:16 pm

vpo-organist wrote:Here is a comparing between i9-9900K, i9-11900K and i9 12900K

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/In ... 3334vs4597


And here are the processors I was comparing, omitting the 12900K as impractical for me for now:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/In ... 3487vs2598

Thanks, vpo-organist. I've been using that site a lot since you pointed it out a couple weeks ago.
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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostSat Nov 27, 2021 4:34 am

I took a look at a few videos on the 12900K based on this post. It's still pretty new and with PCI5, DDR5, there will surely be new hardware that takes better advantage of the new technologies. Therefore, the 11900K is a good solution for the next time ;-)

I had my sights set on the Ryzen 9 5950X, but since single core performance is important for Hauptwerk, the 12900K comes out on top. Let's see how the hardware optimizations around the 12900K develop.

My dream will be achieved when the hardware peripherals make it possible to play samples on the fly from the SSD without having to load the whole sample set into memory. I hope that by then some sampler will support this. It would be nice if Hauptwerk is that candidate...
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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostSun Dec 05, 2021 4:34 pm

@Martin
The 12900K has 8 Performance cores and 8 (slower) efficiency cores. Can this be a performance issue when Hauptwerk use this slower cores?

Will Hauptwerk be able to differentiate between these cores in the future, for example, in order to be able to run not so computationally intensive processes on them?
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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostSun Dec 05, 2021 6:05 pm

vpo-organist wrote:@Martin
The 12900K has 8 Performance cores and 8 (slower) efficiency cores. Can this be a performance issue when Hauptwerk use this slower cores?

Will Hauptwerk be able to differentiate between these cores in the future, for example, in order to be able to run not so computationally intensive processes on them?


This article: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-12900k
briefly discusses the Windows 11 Thread Director, which uses some hardware awareness of which cores and hyperthreads (HT are only on P cores) have capacity in the gen 12 asymmetric sets of cores. If Hauptwerk doesn't accidentally defeat that when reserving certain cores -- for example, by reserving E cores just because of the core numbering -- it might not need any modifications to run well. I would hope the eight P cores are the lowest numbered, but don't know.

But if all the parallel audio and convolution threads need to run at the same clock speed, mixing them across P and E cores might be a problem regardless of better scheduling from Windows.
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mdyde

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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostMon Dec 06, 2021 4:57 am

Hello vpo-organist and Mark,

When load-balancing, Hauptwerk currently assumes that all of the cores that Windows 10/7 reports [via the GetLogicalProcessorInformation() and GetProcessAffinityMask() Windows APIs] perform equally (which has always been the case for previous CPUs) when assigning work to them. Hence it may be that, in the medium-term, in order to get best performance from these latest-generation i9 CPUs that have cores that perform unequally, we will need to add explicit support for them in a future Hauptwerk version (which might only be possible with Windows 11, due to the availability of the relevant Windows APIs).

I'll log an enhancement accordingly.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostMon Dec 06, 2021 5:52 pm

Thank you mnailor for the great article. Very informative!
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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostFri Jan 07, 2022 6:07 pm

An update...

After Dell missed their estimated ship date, they told me there is a part shortage on the Precision workstation model I had ordered. So I canceled that one and shopped again.

Today I ordered a newly available Dell XPS 8950 with an i9-12900K, 128 GB memory, 2 TB SSD, liquid cooled. For about the same price.

I'll see what happens at the Jan 21 estimated ship date this time.
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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostSat Jan 08, 2022 2:59 pm

mdyde wrote:Hello vpo-organist and Mark,

When load-balancing, Hauptwerk currently assumes that all of the cores that Windows 10/7 reports [via the GetLogicalProcessorInformation() and GetProcessAffinityMask() Windows APIs] perform equally (which has always been the case for previous CPUs) when assigning work to them. Hence it may be that, in the medium-term, in order to get best performance from these latest-generation i9 CPUs that have cores that perform unequally, we will need to add explicit support for them in a future Hauptwerk version (which might only be possible with Windows 11, due to the availability of the relevant Windows APIs).

I'll log an enhancement accordingly.


Assuming the Windows 11 Thread Director and Thread Scheduler work as claimed, it may turn out to be better to provide an option for Hauptwerk not to reserve cores and let the OS classify its threads and move them to the right type of cores. Tweaking it in the program might even work against the best resource use. Testing that will be interesting! Thread Director supposedly classifies I/O and non-compute bound threads vs typical applications vs AVX-using threads from their instruction streams.
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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostTue Jan 25, 2022 12:12 am

The new PC arrived today. Just finished the Dell and Windows 11 updates before bedtime. Recabling and tidying up the cabinet tomorrow, after moving stuff around to get more airflow for the i9-12900K to let the fans and liquid cooling do their job. Then I'm installing Hauptwerk.
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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostTue Jan 25, 2022 1:03 pm

I'm spending today disabling the new and exciting bloatware on Windows 11 to make LatencyMon happy. It's even more choked with crap services and apps than Windows 10 was.

But the i9-12900K tests out really well. I ran the Passmark benchmarks on it, and this PC's percentiles are in the high
90s compared with CPU tests of all other PCs, about average among PCs with the same CPU (I initially misstated this). So Dell hasn't throttled it or paired it with insufficient cooling or anything that would sacrifice performance.

So far, LatencyMon likes Speed Shift OFF, Speed Step ON (corrected), and High Performance power plan with the usual "nobody sleeps" adjustments. DPC latency is acceptable during the whole Passmark benchmark suite.

I can't find any combination of settings that pin the cores to their base clock speeds, but it's possible to make them stay below that -- not good for latency. Turbo Boost doesn't have a BIOS toggle.
Last edited by mnailor on Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Ordered a new PC for Hauptwerk

PostWed Jan 26, 2022 5:16 pm

A little setback. The new Dell XPS now says "Rear fan not detected" on power up, while the rear fan blows at full speed until I mash the power button to stop it. Guess I'm making a service call. Never had a new machine croak before.

Later: And now it boots up fine. Repeatedly. A miracle.

Even later: Sigh. Still finding services and apps to disable to prevent a spike into the red on HW CPU meter every few minutes. Dell + Windows 11 seem to have added even more unrecognizable background crap. And I still can't turn off the Windows Search and Windows Search Indexer tasks permanently, despite disabling Windows Search in services and turning off drive indexing. No triggers in Task Scheduler Library. It keeps coming back, and I don't know where else to look.
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