Nucleus i7 powerful enough?

[Petri (Petri K.)]

Does the i7 Nucleus have enough processing power to do upsampling, convolution and other DSP? At least sonicTransporter i7 which is designed for Roon DSP is having higher end CPU (i7 7700).

[andybob (Andrew Cox)]

Roon does hardware [Nucleus introduced in Munich]

Does the i7 Nucleus have enough processing power to do upsampling, convolution and other DSP?

Yes. Roon’s DSP is very efficient. I have seen screenshots of an i5 upsampling to DSD 512. An i7 should be able to simultaneously handle multiple Zones as follows:

• A main Zone with heavy upsampling and multi-channel convolution;

• A headphone Zone with various DSP tools;

• Four or five other Zones.

In short, an i7 should easily handle the typical demands of even a large home.

If you want to stress test the Core then adding multiple Zones with heavy upsampling, multi-channel convolution and multiple PEQ filters is the way to do it. Anything less than that should be OK.

[Petri (Petri K.)]

Roon does hardware [Nucleus introduced in Munich]

Yes. Roon’s DSP is very efficient. I have seen screenshots of an i5 upsampling to DSD 512. An i7 should be able to simultaneously handle multiple Zones as follows:

A main Zone with heavy upsampling and multi-channel convolution;
A headphone Zone with various DSP tools;
Four or five other Zones.

In short, an i7 should easily handle the typical demands of even a large home.

If you want to stress test the Core then adding multiple Zones with heavy upsampling, multi-channel convolution and multiple PEQ filters is the way to do it. Anything less than that should be OK.

Thanks! That’s good enough for me then

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

Roon does hardware [Nucleus introduced in Munich]

Does the i7 Nucleus have enough processing power to do upsampling, convolution and other DSP?

it does… all the way to the max.

[Adeeb]

hi @danny - not sure if you remember this thread where i logged the cpu-related limitations i was facing with my sonicTransporter i7 (dual core) – which I am otherwise very happy with:

Need an upgraded cpu?

Hi @brian, I have made the following changes and retested all the cases I had before. The updated results (which also includes some typo corrections from the previous one) is attached below. The Changes Instead of the previous SRC settings to up/down-sample all PCM to 352.8kHz or 384kHz (depending on the source file) and to up/down-sample all DSD to DSD256, I now up/down-sample all PCM to 176.4kHz or 192kHz (depending on the source file) and to up/down-sample all DSD is left at DEFAULT. I ha…

Do you mean that the i7 Nucleus can handle simultaneus up-sampling to 352.8kHz/384kHz/DSD256 & convolution? If so I’m impressed!

I also wonder what else it can handle on top of that. How crazy do we have to get before it is unable to play reliably?

[brian (Brian Luczkiewicz)]

Do you mean that the i7 Nucleus can handle simultaneus up-sampling to 352.8kHz/384kHz/DSD256 & convolution? If so I’m impressed!

Provided we optimize the software to make that kind of workload practical on an i7, sure. I think we’ll get there at some point…but this has nothing to do with Nucleus.