Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 and Cakewalk

[Jim Hurley]

Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 was introduced into Windows 10 recently, it is also called something like 'Favored Cores'.

It can be read about here:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/turbo-boost/turbo-boost-max-technology.html

I was wondering what might be the impact of that on Cakewalk and the selection of the thread scheduling models.

For those who don't know, this is only available on certain models of Intel processors. It adds a driver to Windows and adds some firmware support to the chip's p-code to support thread movement to different cores without OS involvement. Supposedly it will help thermals and help prevent thermal limiting. Or that is how I read it. 

My naive thoughts are that moving a process from one core to another will wreak havoc to the cache memory.

I ran some tests using a high load Reaktor ensemble running standalone outside a DAW and saw this: (R6-CPU-all-cores.png).

Notice the spread in load across all cores. There is no evidence that any core is stressed. Probably that is due to the low sampling rate or averaging of Task Manager.

Then I set affinity to use only Core 7:  (Reaktor-set-affinity.png).

And then I ran again and see Core 7 showing the load Reaktor reports: (Reaktor-using-only-one-core.png).

I don't know if or how this could be disabled and it does make measuring and testing loads a bit tricky.

Does anyone know more about this new feature and what it means for us in audio?

Edited June 29, 2020 by Jim Hurley
added Favored Cores reference