Hi, * Tobiah [2024-01-13 20:14]: > I decided to test csound speed on a new (to me) Thinkpad. I was surprised > that it greatly outperformed an M1 Macbook air. The Thinkpad has an > AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U. > > Here are two .csd files I used for testing: > > https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1f3y1vDk-q_QQclv--_AYRkrd0BOTQP6t > > bench.csd > > Thinkpad 9.8 seconds > M1 38.8 seconds > > bench2.csd > Thinkpad 8.0 seconds > M1 21.0 seconds > How much RAM do these machines have? [...] > What numbers are you getting with your machine? How are you running these tests? I tried your benchmark csd's on my everyday Thinkpad X230 from 2012 with csound using one of the four CPU cores which qualify as: vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 58 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3320M CPU @ 2.60GHz stepping : 9 microcode : 0x21 cpu MHz : 1197.224 cache size : 3072 KB by executing time csound -d -n bench2.csd 2> /dev/null avoiding writing soundfile to disk and not posting any messages to the console. bench.csd real 1m24.532s user 1m23.433s bench2.csd takes real 0m32.224s user 0m31.875s This doesn't help much in optimizing M1 performance, but shows that 15 year old computers can do good jobs. > Another curiosity that I thought the list might be able to > help with, was that I don't seem to gain any speed by running > multiple csound instances in parallel. I tried this: > > for each in `seq 1 8`; do > csound bench.csd & > done Yes, you are compiling bench.csd eight times yielding identical results. I don't think csound is capable of running parallel jobs on SMP. You'd have to split your composition into individual csd's and compile them at the same time, possibly using such a great tool as GNU parallel: parallel csound *.csd > I see 8 cpu's churning, but it takes about the same > amount of time as it would have had I run the processes > consecutively. The Ryzen is an 8-core 16-thread cpu. > I also tried running these concurrent processes in different > directories, in case the score.srt was getting tied up, but > there was no difference. Csound mailing list Csound@listserv.heanet.ie https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A0=CSOUND Send bugs reports to https://github.com/csound/csound/issues Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here