Dear community,
I recently installed Roon on the latest Asus NUC with Intel’s ‘hybrid’ processor and Ubuntu OS and I was wondering - does Ubuntu/Roon know which cores to use for processing?
The processor in question is a Core Ultra 9 285H featuring 6x P-cores, 8x E-cores and 2x low power cores.
I did look at the system resources monitor but it doesn’t show CPU clocks or which core is which type, as one could see under Windows in software like HWInfo64.
I’m getting about x3.6 processing speed when upsampling to DSD512 in Roon but the power draw from the wall is suspisciously low, about 5W idle and 15W during playback.
The cores are automatically managed by the scheduler in the operating system kernel, and the Linux kernel has supported hybrid CPUs for a decade. As you get 3.6x speed, it’s simply fast enough, and if that really runs on an E-core, why not. If it needed more power, the kernel would probably move the process to a P-core. There is usually no need for users (or user apps) to mess with this.
Sadly this doesn’t answer the initial question. Hopefully some staff can shed some more light on how the scheduling is done and how much involvment from Roon software there is.
Scheduling is done by the operating system kernel. It does this all the time with tens of processes that are running on your Linux system all the time. (Or hundreds or thousands of processes in larger systems). That’s just how it works.
There’s really nothing more to be said but they don’t monitor user discussions here in Roon Software Discussion. You’d have to post in Feedback I guess if you need to hear the same thing from them.