What computer will do HQP upsampling to DSD256 in multichannel?

[Miska]

On 3/24/2017 at 10:59 AM, Keith_W said:

As to whether HQPlayer can actually take advantage of 22 cores, Miska hasn't said anything. So I presume the answer is no. 

 

So there you have it. For almost the same price as a 6950X, you could have a Xeon which has more than twice as many cores, albeit slower thread speed. As for why Miska himself didn't choose a Xeon, I have no idea. I wish he would enlighten us. 

 

There are couple of important factors:

• Base frequency
• Per-core memory bandwidth
• Amount of cache (per core too)

Base clock rate matters, because there's a limit how much things can be spread to cores, so one needs to balance between number of cores and speed of a single core.

 

If you go for Xeon, it is better to get dual-socket one (E5 2xxx v4) with less cores but higher clock speed, because you gain both higher per-core speed, and also double the memory bandwidth because each socket has four memory channels (you also need to populate those!).

 

In 3.16.0 already improved multicore support for CPUs with 8+ cores. 3.16.1 will take this further to higher number of cores. But in any case, one cannot keep increasing number of cores and dropping base frequency too much, but that can be addressed by adding more sockets.

 

How many cores can be optimally utilized also depends on HQPlayer configuration.

 

[Miska]

On 3/27/2017 at 8:22 PM, Sagittarius said:

Quick but relevant question for Miska. Do you think if the upcoming E5 Skylake Xeons have AVX 512 instructions or a subset of the AVX512 instruction set enabled as expected, that would allow HQ player to required lower minimum base frequency requirement? My understanding is that AVX 512 should allow doubling the floating point operations executed per clock cycle.

 

AVX512 will help to some extent, but I don't have any figures yet how much...