Im so confused. I am the first to admit, i have no idea how ram, cores etc come into play with audio, even tho i have been producing for 20 years on a mac.

From what i've gathered from ChatGPT, and the internet, is that in music production, the faster a core's performance is sometimes better than having more cores that are slower??

M4 Max has faster speeds according to tests ive found, but less cores.

I mostly run sessions with many audio tracks, 20 kontakt tracks, some various soft synths, and all of the mixing plugins, including acustica, which requires more ram i think??

What do you guys think? Less cores that are faster at single core level, or more cores that may not perform as well?

 

Take allways more Single Core power!!!

For your workflow with many audio tracks, Kontakt tracks, and plugins: CPU: Prioritize a CPU with strong single-core performance (e.g., M4 Max) unless you regularly work on extremely large projects. RAM: At least 32 GB of RAM is recommended to ensure your projects run smoothly. Long-term consideration: If you plan to work on even larger projects in the future or work extensively with sample libraries, upgrading to a model with more cores might make sense. In summary: For your current setup, the M4 Max seems like a good choice – fast cores and sufficient RAM are crucial for your workflow.

Read more: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-ultra-vs-apple-m4-max-16-core

 

thats what im thinking. I do however work on larger sessions fairly often, hybrid trailer tracks, with 200+ tracks. I still think stronger single core performance may be better, perhaps with upgraded ram of 128 to help handle the kontakt instruments

 

Consider the price too. I could get an M3 Max at half the price of an M4 Max despite being only 20% slower. Then again some plugins in Logic will cause process overload no matter what machine you have. Also GPU seems less important for music.

 

The comparison with the M4 Max is particularly noteworthy, and will be of interest to many buyers. Despite its lower core count of just 16 CPU cores, it lags behind the M3 Ultra in the multi-core test by just seven percent. In the single-core benchmark, the M4 Max even outperforms the M3 Ultra by 20.5 percent. The almost identical clock speeds of both chips (4.05 GHz for the M3 Ultra and 4.14 GHz for the M4 Max) raise questions.

One possible explanation could lie in the architecture of the M4 series. Apple uses the ARMv9 platform for the M4, although it's unclear to what extent the new Scalable Matrix Extensions (SME) play a role. The fact is that the M4 Max demonstrates outstanding single-core performance in synthetic benchmarks.

Synthetic benchmarks provide a first impression but are no substitute for performance evaluation in practical use. While the M3 Ultra is likely to excel in graphics-intensive workloads, the M4 Max could be the better choice for many users due to its high single-core performance.

- M4 Max outperforms M3 Ultra in the single-core test by 20.5 percent

 

Go to 5:44 min...

 

Thanks for the video, unfortunately, its still hard to gauge on real world applications, with kontakt instruments, oversampled plugins etc, as the cores handle these things differently.

Thats sort of what im thinking too. Its much more affordable, and single core performance on Max beats out the Ultra.

20 Percent is a pretty substantial number. To my understanding, single core performance is more important in music production than multi core. At least when it comes to plugin chains on tracks. If you have just a bunch of tracks, with no plugins, multi core may make more sense, but in real world application, with lets say 50 tracks, but they all have 3-4 plugins, better single core performance may be the best solution.

I dont know, its all so confusing.

 

How to choose a killer CPU for audio production
https://www.opus101proaudio.com/how-to-choose-a-killer-cpu-for-audio-production/

 

I know you're speaking about the M4 Max but this video might be useful because it compares performance across different DAWs. He's also done some follow up videos.