Mac 4 versus 8 core machine for Studio Artist

[Joel Nisson]

I am turning in my Mac Power PC machine for a new (used actually) Intel machine.  With Studio Artist and Photoshop my two primary applications, i am wondering whether Studio Artist takes advantage of multiple cores and, if so, there would be an advantage of 8 cores over 4 (and single quad core versus dual duo or dual quad cores).

[Willie Richardson]

SA4 certainly does take advantage of multiple processors. You'll notice a huge difference over Power PC, I'm sure John can fill you in with benchmarks but I think the most I've seen SA use whilst I've been monitoring the situation is 4 at any one time, so a quad processor would be sufficient if that's the case. But the advantage of an 8 core is you you could run several versions of SA at the same time, thereby batch processing in some respect. Or alternatively you can get on with editing and other processor intensive stuff whilst SA is working in the background with no performance hit.
Maybe it's time we did have some benchmarks for SA for various machine specs?? No doubt John D will previde you wiht

[Joel Nisson]

How do you run several versions of SA at the same time? I didn't know that was possible,

[Synthetik]

Anything in Studio Artist that internally threads can take advantage of multiple processors. So in a situation like that 2 processors is faster than 4, 4 is faster than 2, 8 is faster than 4.

Not everything threads, we tend to focus on threading bottleneck code or effects that seem particularly slow. Some processes or effects in Studio Artist also can not be threaded, because they are recursive in nature or otherwise un-threadable. How you split things up is kind of a complicated dance, we try to be smart about the size of the image being threaded because some things will actually run slower in certain situations, like if the images being threaded are small.

The paint synthesizer itself is not currently threaded. But things that go on inside of it may be threaded as they run. Operation modes like image operations, MSG, vectorizer, texture synthesizer, etc are initially spun out into a separate thread to run. And things going on inside of them may be spun out into additional multiple threads. Things that do thread get split to take advantage of the max number of cores. Multiple cores can make a huge difference in the performance of things like the vectorizer or msg effects.

There are other factors associated with speed beside just the number of processor cores. The kind of graphics card you have, the speed of the internal bus and memory, how the internal caching works, all of this influences the overall speed you see as a user of the program. These days i would definitely go with an intel machine as opposed to a ppc machine if you are getting a used machine.

As Willie says, you can run multiple versions of Studio Artist on the same machine at the same time. This may or may not work to your advantage. If you are running something that splits to all N cores, then you're using the entire machine and running a second version of Studio Artist or any other program is not a good idea. But if you are primarily using the paint synthesizer, then you might be able to render something in the background and still be able to do something else in the foreground.

[Willie Richardson]

thanks John, I was confident you'd nail it :)
Yeah the bottom line is SA screams on multicore machines, you'll witness an exponential difference to your workflow Joel, enjoy!

[Joel Nisson]

Thanks John for the thorough explanation.
I realize this is not a SA-specific question, but how do I run more than one instance of SA at a time?

[Synthetik]

Select the studio artist application icon in the finder and do a cmnd d to make a copy of it. Then double click on the copy when you want to run it a second time.

[Joel Nisson]

Thanks John.
--Joel

[Chris Northcross]

Just tried SA 4 out on a Mac Pro working with 1920 x 1080 resolution footage over the weekend. Am just now waking up from the shock. I've been working off of a Macbook for much of the last 4 years and could get SA to do what I wanted but working on a workstation is just...wow.

And now I find out that you can run multiple instances on the same machine?! I may be out of it until Wednesday.

Kudos to you and your team John!