[PlanetCCRMA] Sine waves in real time

[Michael Curtis]

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:29:05 joey.a wrote:

> > Its a 4 year old amd xp2800. I could run about 140 voices in realtime at
> > 80% cpu usage,
>
> Interesting. Your clock is ~ half the speed of Bill's, yet you appear get ~
> the same performance, from the same software.
>
> Does this mean that AMD is ~twice as efficient as Intel, in music
> applications, or that Bill has specified for only 50% CPU loading?

Very much doubt that.  The new Pentium 4s (and Core 2s) have massive floating 
point units which will easily best an Athlon XP.  I think what we might be 
seeing is the impact of RAM speed.  Scheme is an interpreted language, and as 
such will have a large memory footprint (especially Scheme, I think it would 
be quite difficult to parse / execute for a computer).  Hence you're going to 
find that the process is more "memory bound" (needs to access main memory), 
whereas the highly optimised routines in SC probably fit entirely within the 
L2 cache.

Hopefully that explanation makes sense to you.  I've done courses in Computer 
Hardware so I hopefully I've explained things in a way that can be understood 
by people who aren't Hardware geeks ;).