Hollin Jones
Audio professionals need serious processing grunt, so Apple’s tardiness in bringing out the next-generation Mac Pros is going down like a lead balloon.
Musicians were among the first professionals to embrace the Mac platform almost from its creation. After basic graphics and PostScript capabilities, Midi was the other major technology that quickly came to define the market for those early Mac models. Digital audio recording would come much later, but by that stage, musicians were already hooked on the intuitive way of working offered by the Mac. Indeed, it remains the platform of choice for many audio professionals.
Nevertheless, some feel that in recent years the company’s focus on the consumer side of its business – iPods, iPhones and now the iPad – has been to the detriment of its top-end workstation computers. There’s a vocal minority increasingly concerned that Apple is forgetting about the people who create all the content they’re so keen to sell on their various digital stores – albums, movies, books, animations and other creative endeavours.
First, a little background. Professional audio production is one of the most heavyweight tasks you can ask of a computer, up there with HD video and 3D modelling in terms of the sheer amount of grunt required to make it run smoothly. So musicians and producers have always tended to buy top-end machines to cope with the ever-increasing demands of virtual instruments and effects plug-ins. However, for people making music on their Macs, and especially those looking to upgrade an older machine, the options aren’t as straightforward as one might hope.
First, although the jump to Intel processors gave the company’s desktops a welcome boost, updates and major revamps to the Mac Pro line have become more and more infrequent. Right at this moment, the average life cycle of a Mac Pro model is 236 days and yet the time since the last major revision (at the time of writing) has been 343 days – almost a calendar year. There have been rumblings that updates are imminent, and in all honesty they can’t come soon enough for me. If Apple has released new models by the time you read this, you can be sure that, barring a major disaster, I will have placed my order.
Apple has previously enjoyed temporary short-term exclusives on new Intel CPU technology, and the chip manufacturer is soon to release its hexacore ‘Gulftown’ processors, which would seem like ideal candidates for inclusion in the Mac Pro. Although you could hardly call an octocore Xeon-powered computer ‘old technology’, there’s no point in buying something that’s about to be superseded and so a number of producers, myself included, are hanging nervously on, desperate to trade in trusty but flagging dual-core G5s for brand-new models. When you’re shelling out several thousand pounds on a machine that will be the heart of your studio, you need to invest wisely.
This might sound like gear snobbery, but music is one of those areas where those who do it professionally value power, stability and flexibility. Sticking 16GB Ram and a few terabytes of hard drive into a desktop isn’t done for bragging rights, it’s because sample-based virtual instruments and recording at sample rates and quality levels beyond those of conventional CDs will go a lot more smoothly if you do.
The other problem for musicians is one that’s not so much Apple’s fault – the issue of multiprocessing. Every Mac now comes with at least a dual-core processor, and for many people making music or working with audio at all but the highest level, an iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro or even Mac mini is a great machine that will handle your needs perfectly. The vast majority of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) such as Logic, Pro Tools, Cubase and GarageBand are coded to take advantage of two processors or cores, and do so very well. Where they start to struggle is when you have more than two. Some cope admirably with four but, at present, most don’t scale up so well. Eight cores in a Mac Pro, or 16 with hyperthreading? Here it becomes less clear cut how much of a performance boost you’ll get in real-world situations.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Apple-owned Logic software fares pretty well, although there are caveats in the way you have to work to get optimum performance. Other developers without Apple’s advantage of making the software, hardware and operating system are playing catch-up.
The reasons for this inefficiency are technical, but essentially it’s about the difficulty that programmers have in distributing threads or tasks between cores for execution. Eight cores doesn’t necessarily mean eight evenly loaded cores. More often, it means two or three fully loaded cores and lots of idle ones. It’s the real-time nature of audio processing that throws a spanner in the works. If it was a rendering task, you could leave it to crunch away while you went for a cup of tea. But when your goal is real-time, multi-track playback and recording with no latency and using lots of CPU-intensive plug-ins, efficiency using lots of cores seems to be remarkably difficult to achieve.
Which begs the question, why get impatient for a Mac with even more cores when they can’t be used? Well, there are a couple of good reasons. First, they can’t all be used by a music program right at this moment, but Apple’s recently developed Grand Central Dispatch technology, built into Mac OS X 10.6, exists specifically to get around this problem of thread distribution (see apple.com/macosx/technology). We haven’t seen this technology properly harnessed by music software developers yet, but you can be sure they’re working on it. And when it comes of age, if it unlocks even half the potential of a 12- or 24-core system, the possibilities will be incredible.
Second, dual-processor Macs have actually been around for years. Way back in 2000, you could have bought a dual-450MHz or dual-500MHz G4 tower. And even if those speeds seem almost quaint now, those with the foresight and the budget to buy a dual-processor machine got more life out of them in the long-term when Mac OS X came along and improved multiprocessor support. The point is that it took years to realise its potential and while we hope that the current eight- or 12-core Macs take rather less time, with developments and refinements in Mac OS X they’ll surely still be able to do the heavy lifting four or five years from now, when current Core 2 Duo Macs may be struggling.
All the while of course, the demands of music software will be increasing, as will the number of cores Intel manages to shoehorn onto a CPU. For musicians these two things should balance each other out, as long as Apple keeps pushing the multicore abilities of Mac OS X and takes at least some of the attention it has been giving to its consumer devices and focuses it back on its professional Macs. iPods and iPhones are great and are the reason Apple has so much cash, but professionals are the reason Apple survived back in the lean years. Let’s hope it doesn’t forget us now.
