Different workloads have different IPC characteristics. A generalized benchmark like this doesn't really give any guidance on how fast a single core would be for audio processing.
But, as another person mentioned, this benchmark wasn't run at the full boost clock for the 3950X, assuming this isn't a faked result entirely.
Please excuse my lack of experience with audio processing, but...
What you're describing about the output of one plugin being fed into the input of another is analogous to unix shell scripts piping data between processes. It actually does allow parallelization, because the first stage can be working on generating more data while the second stage is processing the data that was already generated, and the third stage is able to also be processing data that was previously generated by the second stage.
Beyond that, if you have multiple audio streams, it seems like each one would have their own instances of the plugins.
So, if you had 3 streams of audio, with 4 different plugins being applied to each stream, you would have at least 12 parallel threads of processing... assuming the software was written to take advantage of multiple cores.
If the software is literally just single threaded, there's nothing to be done but to either accept that limitation or find alternative software.
I really think you should really wait until you see audio processing benchmarks before making dramatic claims like "It looks like I wouldn't be able to run my chain in realtime on this new AMD" based on a -3% difference in performance on a leaked benchmark of a processor that isn't even running at the full clockspeed. How can you be so sure that a 3% difference would actually prevent you from running your "chain" in realtime? But, based on the evidence available, the chip should do 9% better than the recorded result here (4.7GHz actual boost divided by 4.3GHz boost used in the benchmark), reversing the situation and making the Intel chip slower. Suddenly the Intel chip is inadequate?! No, I really don't think so. Even though Zen 2 seems like it will be better, I feel more confident that even a slower chip like the 9900K would be perfectly fine for audio processing.
> is analogous to unix shell scripts piping data between processes
Conceptually yes, but technically, multimedia frameworks don’t have much in common with unix shell pipes.
Pipes don’t care about latency, their only goal is throughput. For realtime multimedia, latency matters a lot.
Processes with pipes have very simple data flow topology. In multimedia it’s normal to have wide branches, or even cycles in the data flow graph. E.g. you can connect delay effect to the output of a mixer, and connect output of the delay back into one of the inputs of the mixer.
Bytes in the pipes don’t have timestamps, multimedia buffers do, failing to maintain synchronization across the graph is unacceptable.
I’m not saying multimedia frameworks don’t use multiple cores, they do. But due to the above issues, multithreading is often more limited compared to multiple processes reading/writing pipes.
I think you're correct on both counts. With the plugins running on separate cores, they wouldn't be trashing each other's caches or branch predictors, so they might actually run faster and offer lower latency than stacking them all onto a single core... but odds are low that the difference would be significant.
The main advantage is that you wouldn't be limited in the number of plugins you could run by the performance of a single core, since you could run each plugin on its own core, like you mentioned.
Obviously, having faster individual cores means that each plugin introduces less total latency, but the difference in single-threaded performance between Zen 2 and Intel's best is likely to be very small, and I fully expect Zen 2 to have the best single-threaded performance in certain applications.
You wouldn't want to run a plugin on each core, you would want to run a chunk of samples on each core. Then the data is staying local (and the instructions aren't going to change so they will stay cached as well).
But, as another person mentioned, this benchmark wasn't run at the full boost clock for the 3950X, assuming this isn't a faked result entirely.
Please excuse my lack of experience with audio processing, but...
What you're describing about the output of one plugin being fed into the input of another is analogous to unix shell scripts piping data between processes. It actually does allow parallelization, because the first stage can be working on generating more data while the second stage is processing the data that was already generated, and the third stage is able to also be processing data that was previously generated by the second stage.
Beyond that, if you have multiple audio streams, it seems like each one would have their own instances of the plugins.
So, if you had 3 streams of audio, with 4 different plugins being applied to each stream, you would have at least 12 parallel threads of processing... assuming the software was written to take advantage of multiple cores.
If the software is literally just single threaded, there's nothing to be done but to either accept that limitation or find alternative software.
EDIT:
AMD claims that their benchmarks show that the 3900X is faster at Cinebench single threaded than the Intel 9900K. (https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14525/COMPUTEX_KEYNOTE_DRA...) The 3950X has a higher boost clock, so it should be even faster.
I really think you should really wait until you see audio processing benchmarks before making dramatic claims like "It looks like I wouldn't be able to run my chain in realtime on this new AMD" based on a -3% difference in performance on a leaked benchmark of a processor that isn't even running at the full clockspeed. How can you be so sure that a 3% difference would actually prevent you from running your "chain" in realtime? But, based on the evidence available, the chip should do 9% better than the recorded result here (4.7GHz actual boost divided by 4.3GHz boost used in the benchmark), reversing the situation and making the Intel chip slower. Suddenly the Intel chip is inadequate?! No, I really don't think so. Even though Zen 2 seems like it will be better, I feel more confident that even a slower chip like the 9900K would be perfectly fine for audio processing.