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Comment by dt2m | Hacker News Reader

> Counterintuitively, it seems that under very light load, things work well, and under very heavy load, things work well, but for medium loads, there is failure. Also counterintuitively, the newer M1 Pro and M1 Max CPUs, with more performance cores (6-8) and fewer efficiency cores (2), seem to have a larger "medium load" range where things don't work well.

Source (https://1014.org/?article=854)

This explains Justin Frankel's observations in the article above. It's a bit annoying there seems to be no way to force a process to only run on the P cores with no throttling. Having mostly bought a M1 Mac for music production, I keep running into this exact issue. Light workloads invoke more processing glitches than running loads of tracks and plugins at the same time.

Hopefully developers will eventually get more granular control of this for high-performance apps, battery life be damned.

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>It's a bit annoying there seems to be no way to force a process to only run on the P cores with no throttling.

I'm not sure about the throttling side of things as I've mostly worked with M1 Mac Mini, but Logic Pro has CPU thread settings to limit things to just P cores. My guess is that it will take time for other DAW's to implement similar features.

Can't say I've had many issues performance wise in Logic, but I've had some crashing with newer plugins like Korg's recent plugin version of the OP-Six. Especially when memory use ramps up. Reported my findings back to Korg's tech support, but no solutions yet.

Anecdotally, Logic has consistently been the worst DAW in my testing, performance-wise, when it comes to hosting plugins. Maybe it's due to the AU format, but the de facto result is the same.

I run Ableton, FL, Pro Tools and Logic (mainly working in Ableton) and my goal is to record at 48k with a buffer length of 32 samples, with very light use of plugins. In my testing with the exact same plugins, Logic would consistently have buffer overflows every minute or so.

Ableton ran far more stable (especially in Rosetta), but PT was the only DAW to do it without hiccups. My initial guess is that the AAX plugin format is more tightly coupled to its internal processing, improving performance. But I was quite shocked to find out that Logic (Apple's own software) performed the worst.

Plugin development in general is a shitshow where most devs seemingly only do enough to get them barely working, so I'm not surprised most of them misbehave on ARM. It's a bit sad that we're two years into the Apple Silicon transition and performance still is so rocky.

This is interesting to read- For me Logic is the lightest on CPU of all the DAWs I use. (Ableton 11, FL Studio, Reason 12,UAD Luna, Cubase 10.5) on my iMac pro (base model 8 core Xeon with 32gb ram)

Ableton, while it is my main daw and by far my favorite, is pretty CPU heavy as of Version 11.(10 was not quite as bad) The others are more or less similar in performance in terms of track count and latency. Ableton is completely usable but I usually start having to freeze tracks as the track count hits ~24ish depending on what plugins Im using.

With Logic, I can usually get closer to 2x that amount, but I should probably do a more apples to apples comparison.

I do have my eyes on the Mac Studio as my next Audio computer, but Im hoping to stretch my iMac Pros lifespan closer to the 10 year mark if I can...

For what it’s worth, I’ve had the same experience on x86 with Logic being stable as a rock, it just seems to be a M1 thing. Without a doubt this can be sorted out down the road, but Apple’s insistence on only using AU in Logic means that every plugin in Logic is going to take a performance hit as nearly all devs write a VST version and wrap that in an AU.

More complexity = more room for errors especially on a new cpu architecture.

Justin Frankel is the author of the DAW called Reaper, among other things.

Is this why audio playback glitches on my M1 Mac when I'm using it but not doing anything particularly heavy?

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