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 | | | | Apr30Written by:Pete Leoni
Sunday, April 30, 2000 6:00 PM  It's hard to believe that nearly 2 years have passed since I wrote the original "Roll Your Own" Article!
I have heard from hundreds of you who built the original machines, and I want to take this opportunity to thank every one of you for all of the kind words and input. This time we are going to more than double the performance of that machine, and for only a bit more cash. And for those of you who already own the original Roll Your Own, you will be glad to know that you can pretty much double your machine's current CPU performance for only about $200.
Needless to say, there has been a lot of advancement in computer hardware since the first article was written. As with the original Roll Your Own, our goal will once again be "how to construct a DAW that has the highest possible performance within reasonable economic boundaries".
I realize that this article will be read by those of you who built the original machine and have since achieved a degree in "Geekdom" as well as those of you who will be building your first computer. The first section of this article may be a bit technical, so some of you may chose to skip it and get right down to the construction. For those of us who have graduated from "Geek 101" however, I think these points will be pretty interesting.
I have started to update this article at least three times and, each time I was sure I had a viable recipe for a new DAW, there was a significant development in the industry that caused me to re-think the issue. (Not to mention spend more money on gear to test.) However, there has recently been a convergence of several technologies that create a new price / performance benchmark that we can capitalize upon.
Here are some of the factors that have kept the water muddy for the last 12 months:
1. Running the Athlon
Because AMD's Athlon chip has very high FPU performance, for a time it seemed like the Athlon would be the CPU of choice for audio. We soon learned however that using the Athlon and its associated VIA chipset limited our sound card choices. In fact, cards by Echo, Lexicon, Aark, Guillemot and a few others would not work at all in these machines. In addition, many audio applications are now being optimized for Intel's PIII SIMD instruction set, and the Athlon does not support these extensions. Make no mistake though, the Athlon is a fine audio performer, but it is not "everyman's" chip.
2. The Intel PIII
The first PIII that Intel produced was little more than a PII with SIMD instructions. Like its predecessor the PII, it had its L2 cache off-board the main CPU die and it ran at half the CPU speed. Most of us were already using an overclocked Celeron chip, which had equal, if not better audio performance. True, the original Celeron lacked SIMD instructions, but few apps took advantage of them at that time (this is now changing rapidly and many audio apps are now being optimized).
3. The Intel Coppermine PIII
At last! A chip with high FPU performance, high speed, and fast onboard L2 cache. Perfect, right?
Except for one small problem. Amazingly, Intel made a monumental blunder and put all of its eggs into a new memory technology call RAMBUS. Unfortunately, RAMBUS memory costs about 5 times as much as SDRAM memory and has very little performance gain at all over SDRAM (the current standard). In fact, the situation is so bad that Intel itself was forced to manufacture motherboards with chipsets that included a converter to translate from RAMBUS memory to SDRAM. These boards (using the Intel i820 and associated chipsets) have poor memory performance, and In fact at the time of this writing, Intel has recalled over a million of these motherboards. Quite a costly mistake!
The debate about Athlon versus PIII performance has been very heated in the DAW world. Processors are religious issues with some people. We decided to benchmark the PIII against the Athlon to determine if the Athlon chip's reputedly superior performance would actually prove itself in real world applications (read about our Benchmarks here). What the benchmark showed us is that, yes, the Athlon does enjoy a slight performance improvement over Pentiums of the same clock speed. The difference ranges from negligible to noticable, but not the order-of-magnitude improvement that early reports were touting. And, yes, the Athlon chips are cheaper than their comparable Pentium counterparts.
However, remember that these small improvements in performance will be completely negated if your audio app supports Intel's SIMD instructions! Audio apps that support SIMD will enjoy a healthy advantage on Intel chips versus similar chips from other manufacturers.
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