We recently saw that according to our latest poll, over 50% of the community that we polled, say they will switch from Mac to Windows or to a Hackintosh computer. While a lot of this could be down to aesthetic preferences, and familiarity with OS-X, we've also noticed a rise in people complaining about CPU spikes, and AVE errors. This to me didn't add up. 64bit code (Pro Tools 11 onwards) was supposed to give you more performance on the same hardware. Certainly my experience on Windows was that system usage was cut by over 60%.

Why Aren't Things Getting Any Better?

From my own perspective, advances in software versions have been two very different experiences on my Windows system and my MacBook Pro. Successive versions of Pro Tools have performed better and better on Windows, but got progressively worse on Mac. In particular I'm suffering more and more on my Mac with CPU spikes, excessive fan noise and AVE re-initialisation loops. 

The Devil Is In The Detail

Inspired by the poll results and the feedback to my "Is 2017 The Year Of The Windows Self Build?" article, I've been researching a range of Windows equivalents to the Mac range of computers. In the course of doing this, a very knowledgeable computer expert friend of mine explained something to me about "off the shelf" processors and audio processing. The answer lies within this table...

The four entries on the left are current generation PC options and the four entries on the right are current generation Mac options. The single core score dictates the cut-off point of the processor handling. On a typical DAW, each complete channel is loaded onto a individual CPU thread.

So if track 1 has say noise reduction, EQ and dynamics, then all of those are loaded to the same thread/core. Then track 2 and all effects are loaded onto the next one, etc. Once we hit the last thread, it should allocate back to the next available thread (whatever has finished processing already) and It’ll keep stacking them until such a point where all threads are maxed out and then it will overload. With 64bit Pro Tools, native plugin allocation is dynamic, as described above. Pro Tools 10 and earlier used static allocation, like with TDM and HDX cards, which is why you had to select how many processors you wanted to dedicate to native processing.

With low single core scores, it’s possible that one complex chain might eat up an entire thread allocation within a given timespan, which would result in just one channel of audio overloading the whole chip. This means that the lower the single core score, the quicker it is likely to overload whilst using complex audio chains.

Conclusion

What we see above is that even the mid-range quad core i7 processor is capable of beating the Mac Pro six core edition with ease, for roughly a third of the price. This is because since the design of the current Apple Mac Pro, processor, RAM and GPU technology has come on in leaps and bounds, in fact leap-frogging what used to be a state of the art specification. Even the current spec Mac Pro is in reality two or three generations of technology out of date. With this much advantage over Apple hardware, Windows coding can afford to be a little sloppier and still give a better user experience.

Maybe as Tim Cook promised, things will get better for cash strapped professionals soon. Maybe they'll get better, but at a price? What do you think will happen? If Apple came out with a new super computer aimed at professionals, but still double or triple the price of the Windows alternative, would you still buy it? Please let us know in the comments.

A Huge Thank You to Pete from our new partner Scan Computers, for all his help and information.