As a precursor to this article, I demonstrated that the Pro Tools System Usage meter, although very pretty, doesn’t display what is actually happening with the load across the CPUs in a computer. To get a much more accurate display of this, you need to turn to the tools available in your operating system, whether macOS or Windows.

In this article, I demonstrate the power available in the new Mac Pro 7,1 compared to a Mac Pro 6,1 Trashcan with the same Pro Tools session.

The New Mac Pro 7,1 - Is It What I Am Looking For?

The first announcement about the new Mac Pro came in 2017.  It was intriguing.  I’d been well-supported by my Trashcan since early 2014, but I was beginning to feel its limitations.  There was the rat’s nest of cables going to my dual monitors, along with various Thunderbolt and USB devices. The amount of space taken up by external drives and adapters was easily larger than the footprint of my old 2009 Cheesegrater. And I must admit to some irritation with aspects of the industrial design.  It seemed that every time I touched the Trashcan a cable would fall out. 

At that point, none of us knew what the new computer would be, but I started a fund to buy one, just in case. By the summer of 2018, we finally had a picture of what was coming.  It seemed Apple’s apologies regarding the Trashcan were sincere. So I kept putting some money into my little fund.

You May Not Know This

One of the things that is not so well known about me—at least in this world—is that I was trained as a classical composer (of the non-tonal variety). I also had a lot of experience in early computer music and spent a couple of years in the old MIT computer music studio (pre Media Lab).

I had some success as a composer in years past, but that fell by the wayside as my tech career ramped up. One of the exciting things about moving into semi-retirement is that I can dust off those skills and combine them with what I’ve learned since.

A former incarnation of my studio had multiple Kurzweil and Roland synths, external FX boxes, reel-to-reel, DAT, etc.  That’s long gone, replaced by virtual instruments that sound much much better—and use much, much more memory and CPU. I’m completely in-the-box now.

Plans For The Future

So here’s where I tell you about what I plan to do over the coming years.  I built a company that some of you may know (Exponential Audio), which I sold to iZotope in late 2018. I certainly want to continue supporting iZotope over the foreseeable future, maybe by exploring some ideas with them and doing some testing.

I record classical music regularly, sometimes in formal sessions and sometimes live.  Either way, they rarely involve more than 6-8 mics, but I do record at high sample rates (192K) so that’s the equivalent of maybe 32 disk channels at 44.1.  Because of my strong interest in immersive audio, those mixes are done in stereo (for the clients) and in immersive (for me and perhaps for future client delivery).  So we can throw in a few immersive reverbs, busses and other bits and bobs. I’m wasn’t killing the Trash Can, but I was getting closer. Throw in the Dolby Atmos native renderer and things get more interesting.

Perhaps Its Time For A New Computer?

When one is preparing to spend a boatload of money on a computer, it’s important to determine just what you need and how you’re currently limited.  I’ve just complained about the cable tangle in the old Trashcan, but that wasn’t fatal.  Was there a way I could keep using it?

As it turns out, I had a great test case.  I had MIDI and other sound files for an old piece (about 25 minutes in duration) that was symphonic in scope.  I decided to adapt that piece to an immersive world, moving the tracks to modern VIs and mixing the whole thing in Dolby Atmos.  I also used several of my immersive reverbs and a couple of Excaliburs. Total track count was a little over 200.  Could the Trashcan Handle it? 

The last incarnation of that Mac was a terabyte of SSD internally, 64Gig of DRAM and an external RAID-0 in a Thunderbolt enclosure using Samsung SSDs.  My VIs lived on that external drive and I set it up to give me the maximum speed possible. To get any more speed would have required an external PCIe enclosure and an even bigger cable mess.

I found I could do the Atmos mix, but only just.  I had to freeze all the instrument tracks (about 100 MIDI tracks) except for tracks I was editing. Load time for the session was typically 15-20 minutes, most of which was fetching the VI data. I filled up nearly all of the 64GB of RAM and took just about every available CPU cycle. Doing anything was like wading through molasses.

What I Did And Didn’t Need In A New Computer

At this point, I knew what I needed…

• More memory—a lot more—in order to build templates I’d need for ongoing composition. I also wanted to be able to preload as much sample data as possible.

• Faster storage—a lot faster—so that I could load sessions more quickly.

• Faster processing for everything.  Pro Tools, Atmos, VIs and programming things of personal interest.

• A single computer for everything I do.  Many people have great results by hooking up multiple machines with VEPro. But at my age, less stuff is a good thing.

I also knew what I wasn’t likely to need…

• Powerful video rendering. I know (many of you told me so) that I have no future as a videographer.  Occasional home movies are all I need there.

• Very low latency isn’t a big necessity.  I don’t track here—my room is for composing, editing and mixing only.  I record classical sessions on a separate portable rig. So HDX is not part of my requirements list.

As the new Mac Pro came closer to release, I thought about the system configuration and what it would cost.  Mike Thornton spent quite a bit of time estimating costs in an article last fall. I used that as a basis, with modifications for my personal needs. It turned out to be very close to the mark. Here’s what I ended up with:

• Mac Pro 7,1 16-core, 2TB internal SSD, 384GB DRAM. Using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, this memory measures around 2777 MB/s write and 2853 MB/s read.

• Sonnet M2 4x4 PCI card with 4x 2TB Samsung EVO 970 M.2 cards for VIs.  I configured this as an 8TB RAID-0 drive. Speed measures at around 6575 MB/s write and 7997 MB/s read. Wow!

• A pair of Sonnet Tempo cards.  I still had the SSDs from my Thunderbolt enclosure, so why not use them?  This gives me another 8TB (RAID-0) and another 4TB (RAID-0) enclosure for session storage, photos, music and so on. Speeds there aren’t as fast (around 750 MB/s) due to the nature of SSDs.  Still beats spinning rust though!

• A Sonnet USB card.  I needed a bit more than the basic Mac configuration and I got sick of powered hubs all over the place.  I still have a few, but it’s not so bad now.

• One external 8TB RAID-1 (leftover from an earlier incarnation of Exponential Audio) for Time Machine. Spinning rust.

• A dual bay USB disk dock for rotating backup. That’s spinning rust too. This is a repurposed existing dock.

The whole system cost was a bit over $13K.  There is no way to say that doesn’t hurt a little.  But it’s a machine that will help me serve my responsibilities to IZotope and other friends in the business.  It will support my own efforts too and should serve me for many, many years to come.  It doesn’t hurt that the whole system is more compact, especially compared to what I had before.

Why RAID-0?

There are two things you might have noticed in my system description.  One of these is my use of RAID-0 configurations.  This type of RAID gives you the fastest possible performance out of multiple matched drives.  But because there’s no redundancy, it’s always possible you could lose valuable data. It’s never happened to me yet, but it could be disastrous if it did. This brings up the second part of my description—2 different types of backup. 

Time Machine is great for backups of your system drive and you barely have to think to use it.  For those USB docks, I pop in a pair of 8TB bare spinning-rust drives (cheap as chips these days) and back up everything on a daily schedule using Carbon Copy Cloner but there are alternatives. 

Those two drives get swapped with an offsite pair every week or so. This was critical for a business, but it’s just as important to you even if all you have is hobbyist mixes and family photos.

How Did This New Mac Pro 7,1 Compare With That VI Dolby Atmos Session?

The first thing I noticed was that the session load time was just under two minutes (as opposed to over fifteen minutes with the Trashcan) with all VIs active—not frozen.  Here are some pictures to show how it did:

This is the Atmos renderer.  As you can see, the mix was something like 69 objects in total.  This was a pretty busy spot in the mix and you can see audio all over the 3D field. This display is a lot of fun to watch.

To be fair, I started with the same conditions as on the Trashcan:  VIs were frozen, meaning that they simply become voices from storage.

This is the All Processes display from the macOS Activity Monitor.  At this busy moment in the mix, you can see that Pro Tools is using 301% CPU and Dolby is using another 213%.  That’s a total of just over 5 cores of CPU load—on a system with 16 cores. Let’s look at what’s happening in individual cores:

This is the CPU History display (FWIW, I don’t find much value in the Pro Tools CPU meter, see my earlier article for more details).

Because the processor is hyperthreaded, it shows 32 virtual cores.

The left and right columns represent the two virtual cores of each physical core.  

The fact that there’s so little stuff going on in the right column means that only one virtual core is in use.  This isn’t good or bad: it’s related to the type of process going on and whether or not one virtual core may be blocked waiting for a resource.

This display shows maximum core load over a period of 2-3 minutes. 

I believe the Atmos Renderer is running in the first 8 physical cores and Pro Tools is spread across all 16.

Only a couple of the cores are above 50%; most are around 35% or so.  This means that the system has room to grow and that I can write bigger pieces, but more importantly I can support new VIs—which will surely be hungrier for CPU cycles.

But why stop here?  What happens if I unfreeze all the VIs and let all the instruments play in real time?  Remember that killed the Trashcan…

Between Pro Tools and Dolby, I’m still using only about half of the available CPU cycles as a whole.  When we look at the individual cores, I see this…

I’m now hitting 75%-80% on the first 8 cores and perhaps 55%-60% on the rest.  There’s still considerable margin.

It’s also worth noting that during the course of composition, it’s unlikely I’d be running the Atmos renderer at all. I might even be happy composing in stereo and thinking about spacial implications later on. 

Working this way means that I can freeze VIs when it comes time to mix and still have a whopping margin of available CPU.

Was Is Worth It?

As you know, moving your life from one computer to another is a painful process no matter how carefully you plan.  Finding a machine that can fit your specific needs for several years helps you feel that pain less often.

To put it into context, my first Mac was an LC-II.  In today’s dollars that 16MHz processor with 4MB of RAM cost me $3,100.  This new computer cost 4 times as much. But it’s roughly 3,200 times as fast with 96,000 times as much RAM.  That’s a pretty good deal in my book!