Best CPU for a show machine

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

Ack. I have a big event approaching fast. I am putting together a new desktop to run it…

I cant find much about recommended CPU choices for Touch. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

FYI, (mostly ignoring the graphics side of things), the touch program that will be running has a lot of animated characters (Bones/blend shapes). Animations are driven by cross chops and lots of various other chops.

Lots of GLSL particle shaders. Midi in/out links to Ableton that will be driving the timing of the animations. And (haven’t figured this out yet), but communication with another machine that will send trigger signals to drive responses.

Also, lots of trigger chops linked to tops to drive animated materials etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated…

2

You’ll want to go for high clock rate and less cores in that case. Unless you are playing back movies TD is mostly single threaded so you’ll want your main thread to run as fast as possible.

3

Perfect. exactly what i needed to know…

4

The i7 quad cores work quite well since they have high clock speeds and are affordable compared to workstation hex and octa cores.

5

Good point, I’d definitely go for a i7 over a Xeon in this case

6

Consider this chart for better decision taking.
cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

7

To add to Barak’s chart, I’m not 100% savvy on the difference in the i-series numbering (I believe its mostly to do with hyper threading and virtualization?), but Kinect 2 minimum specs removed i5 a little while ago and pushed it to i7. Now that may be because most i7’s are going to be fast, but it may also be feature related. So I’d personally stick to an i7 on that chart.