Would like to build a high-core Win7 or Win8 system to support high counts of VSTi plug-ins.  Feedback to date indicates whether high plug-in counts can be achieved or not depends primarily on how EVENLY Sonar is capable of distributing load across cores (whether multiple physical cores in a single CPU, or multiple cores across more than 1 CPU).  Anyone with empirical feedback on Sonar's core-load evenness capabilities?  Thanks.

I don't think it's always up to Sonar, e.g. Izotope Ozone (a well known plugin) is written only for a single core I think.

If you currently have a multi-core CPU, you can download the X3 demo... and give it a whirl.
You should find that X3 is pretty well optimized for multiple CPU cores.
Noel/etc can correct me if I'm mistaken, but I believe the GUI runs on one core... so it's normal to see a single core that's running a bit higher than the rest.  
 
FWIW, I use a six-core CPU in my main studio DAW.  
X3 spreads the load across all twelve virtual cores... with a single core bearing slightly higher load.

+1, people tend to get excited by this and not understanding the underlying reason. Core 0 tends to be the "workhorse" in ANY application (much of the OS is firmly planted there too).
 
Additionally, the right combination of CPU-hungry VST(i)s can bring even the most "powerful" machine to its knees.

There is an excellent article on the Cakewalk site discussing Sonar's utilization of the Intel I7 features.
Google "Cakewalk DAW Labs Processor Spotlight: Intel Core i7 Processor"
and it should take you right to it..
 
Michael

I also recall Intel actually used Sonar to showcase multicore capabilities. Unless that was the same article?

In any case, I didn't mean to imply Sonar doesn't distribute evenly. Just that some plugins might have their own ideas about multicoring.

This is a nice post Noel made in that massive thread a while ago. The white paper link is nice to read (since it was written by Intel), and this quote is a nice one "For 12 years, SONAR* has been the first workstation to support all Microsoft’s* operating systems, and the first to pioneer support for many Intel technology developments: hyper-threading, multiprocessor architectures, multicore processing and 64-bit processing."
 
Since it is 2 years old, I assume it could read "For 14 years..."

Looks like they changed that article
Google these instead...
"Utilizing Intel® AVX with Cakewalk SONAR* X1"
"Multi-core Processors for Muscians"
 
Michael

Jim Roseberry
If you currently have a multi-core CPU, you can download the X3 demo... and give it a whirl.
You should find that X3 is pretty well optimized for multiple CPU cores.
Noel/etc can correct me if I'm mistaken, but I believe the GUI runs on one core... so it's normal to see a single core that's running a bit higher than the rest.  
 
FWIW, I use a six-core CPU in my main studio DAW.  
X3 spreads the load across all twelve virtual cores... with a single core bearing slightly higher load.

Thanks, Jim.  I hope to have the hardware soon...hence my questions at this point.  Sounds like you are observing relatively even load across all 12 threads (consisting of 6 physical cores and 6 logical (hyperthreaded) cores).  Do you have any insights if X3 is capable of spreading evenly over two CPUs, each having multiple cores?  Thanks.

I have an i7 4770K processer in my new PC.  X3 shows 8 threads.  Thread one seems to be getting a bit more work than the others but I aint exactly complaining because this PC is a freakin' beast man!