Hi all
I've been using Pd and having netpd sessions on my 8 year old Laptop happily ever since. Recently, I was doing a session on my much newer (1 year old) work computer and I was hitting the CPU limit much quicker than I'd expected. I booted my old laptop and loaded the session there and the Pd load on a core was around 55%. The old laptop has Core 2 Duo T8300 (2.4GHz) CPU, the newer one a i5-3427U (1.8GHz) CPU. Admittedly, the newer model goes under 'ultrabook' while the old one is a classic old-school quite heavy laptop. Still, I'm surprised to see that the per-Core performance has _decreased_ over the time. It seems that (mobile) CPU development is focused on "more cores" and "less power" and less on "more performance per core". Which is probably a good thing in general, but not quite what would benefit Pd.
Now, what should I do when my beloved thinkpad dies? Asking naively: Do I need to buy another ugly|bulky|heavy laptop to get the performance I got used to? A thing I'm wondering about is that a CPU benchmarking website [1] lists for the i5-3427U a single thread rating of 1435 and for the T8300 a rating of 934. So, according to this benchmark, the newer model is supposed to be faster, even when running single-threaded applications. Obviously, benchmark results most likely depend on the type of test load and running many Pd patches is a different kind of load from what was used to do the benchmarking. Maybe I'm asking naive questions, but are there CPU models known to be good for DSP-like workloads? Would Pd's performance benefit from those? How can one identify "good" models? What happened to the "newer = faster" rule?
[1] http://www.cpubenchmark.net
Roman