This is a good video explaining the how and what of current M2 CPU use (though to be clear, it is based on mastering not mixing or creative workflow.)
I’m on M1 standard in Live 11 (latest version) and have a session at the moment where I deliberatley pushed it (real world use, not the 100+ tracks test.) It survived without breaking up at around 70 tracks (needing to freeze one or two heavy things here and there) I set the buffer at 64 samples to see if the idea of lowering it helped any. More than enough headroom for hobby production, but I am relearning the idea that lower (rather than higher) is better for the buffer with M1.
I haven’t tested which cores this session is actually using yet. But from reading around the issue seems to be that Ableton can somewhat use the efficiency cores but doesn’t exploit them fully like Reaper. This explains Pro performance being higher because of course the Pros have at least 2 performance cores. The more puzzling thing is that anecdotally, people say that Logic runs very well (as you’d expect from an Apple product.) But James’ video suggests in theory Logic runs more or less the same as Ableton. Abelton has seemingly become more unstable and seems the chew up CPU more readily; specifically this seems to be tied to the slew of new features released around Push 3.
It does feel like M1 was a big step forward and it’s just going through a bumpy phase now. I guess 70 tracks is still pretty mega performance wise, but it does feel like you need to freeze & flatten more than the vanilla v11 release. I’m not sure how possible it is for developers to target the efficiency cores, but for Live 12 and beyond that would make a big difference.
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