From KVR forums :
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopi ... 6&start=90
EvilDragon wrote:
Audio drivers, though, might be. We'll need to wait for benchmarks after the fix is rolled out on Windows (for macOS, that's already in 10.3.2.)
you’d have to be talking lots of channels (as on 24+ channels input) at very high sample rates AND small buffer sizes before the interrupt rate of any audio interface became enough to even measure
for DAWs that run each plugin in it’s own process the overhead of
the context switching for that is many times greater (especially when multiplied by the number of plugins a project will have vs the number of channels in/out).
lnikj wrote:
We aren't average computer users when we have Diva, B2 etc on multiple tracks.
The real problem isn't the CPU intensive nature of Diva or B2. The problem comes in when
we have to switch to the kernel to handle an interrupt.
Every time you need to send a sample buffer to your USB audio interface you need to do that. So yeah,
this is a big deal for sound design people. It's
also a big deal if you stream data to/from disk. So
Omnisphere and Kontakt users will feel this.
EvilDragon wrote:
Not when you're streaming hundreds of voices on the lowest DFD buffer size from your SSDs. That's a lot of random disk reads right there. Sure it might not saturate the bandwidth fully, but it IS a lot of streaming.
true - people running vienna ensemble could possibly hit high enough i/o loads for it to matter I'd expect. So
potentially an issue for people working in the scoring area
by EvilDragon; Wed Jan 03, 2018 1:57 pm
You don't even need to run VEP. Just have a bunch of Kontakt instances streaming various heavy orchestral and other libraries from multiple SSDs at a time (I have 4 1 TB SSDs just for this)...
by rgarner; Thu Jan 04, 2018 12:27 pm
I'm running MacOS 10.12.6, or Sierra (no High – I'm holding off due to that OS still settling down).
I installed this patch on 23rd December, because I had a bit of time spare in the holidays. I was a bit shocked to see the two-reboot loop that usually indicates something firmware- or kernel-related.
I also bought Softube Volume 1 and got into Modular, which I thought was incredibly CPU heavy – suddenly I was having to boost my Logic Pro X I/O buffer size from 128 to 1024 to even run 3 or 4 of these plugins on a (bought earlier this year) top-of-the-line mid-2015 Macbook Pro with quad-core i7@2.8Ghz/16GB, and I'm frequently getting "couldn't process audio in time".
After hearing about Meltdown this morning, I went back to my previous mixes that have never had CPU problems and don't use Modular. Sure enough, I can't run any of them on the built-in outputs without having to whack the I/O buffer up, and that's often no longer enough.
So for me, the "hysteria" about this is entirely justified.
On the other hand :
by EvilDragon; Fri Jan 05, 2018 7:02 am
So after some encouraging results from people at VI-C and GS, I pulled the patch. I did a DAWbench VI
in Reaper before the patch and after, and
I'm getting much the same numbers: 820 voices at 128 samples buffer with my RME UFX+, and with the factory library on Samsung 850 EVO. i7-6700K at 4.5 GHz here.
So, it seems that ASIO performance wasn't affected one bit (at least as far as Reaper is concerned). Looks like DAW users fall into "average workload" crowd.
But this concerns
Reaper, not Reason...
Also, since it is now known that 'Spectre' can be mitigated by patching software,
and both Meltdown and Spectre rely on attackers abusing the exploits through software,
I still believe it is very likely that AV developpers and the likes could be able to equally mitigate BOTH exploits in the (near ?) future.
Meltdown has already been fully documented so they can already get busy on that (?)
Spectre is still highly speculative, and still not fully understood, so we don't know yet what that will bring...
My best advice is still to go ahead and install the patch if you have a 6-7-8th gen cpu, for everyone else I would hold off, unless you run Win10, then you'll have to anyway...