[LAU] Box under £400

[S. Massy]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 01:14:34PM +0200, Robin Gareus wrote:
> On 05/31/2012 07:16 AM, Gabriel M. Beddingfield wrote:
> > On 05/30/2012 09:21 AM, Sciss wrote:
> >> thanks for the link and the info. so you think atom processors are
> >> fine enough? the latency actually doesn't matter in my case. i'm more
> >> worried that i'm going to through a lot of CPU heavy stuff on it, as
> >> this will run experimental software I wrote myself (and I won't have
> >> any time for performance tuning of the software itself).
> > 
> > I have an Atom N450 netbook.  In practical terms, its limits for a
> > single task are:
> > 
> >   * Time-stretching a clip in realtime to 50% to original
> >     time span.
> > 
> >   * A set with 4-5 monophonic synths, and 4-5 pure audio
> >     tracks.
> > 
> >   * All of the Renoise sample programs
> > 
> >   * Most anything you can throw at Mixxx.
> 
> Interesting! Thanks for sharing.
> 
> > While it has very good audio performance -- it has significantly less
> > headroom than a Core2 or i-series processor (feels like a factor of 2 or
> > 4).
> > 
> > Other non-audio tasks:
> > 
> >   * Large compiles take 4-6x longer (e.g. kernel, Qt)
> > 
> >   * Number crunching tasks are very slow.  It's like the
> >     floating point stuff is driving drunk.
> 
> LOL.
> 
> >   * Processor has a high performance hit for inefficient
> >     memory access (compared to Core2, i-series).
> 
> Clearly. i5 has 8192KB L1 cache.
> I have not seen an ATOM CPU with more than 512KB.
Just a layman speaking here, but aren't those two processor types
designed for vastly different purposes? Seems to me that, for audio as
for any other application, one has to consider the use-case. For simple
field-gigging or for some installation where multiple small devices are
expected to perform fairly straightforward tasks, the smaller,
energy-friendly Atom would be best, while CPU-hungry real-time
applications would be best handled by a top-of-the-range hardware
platform.

Cheers,
S.M.