[LAU] hardware - Intel CPUs

[Len Ovens]

Further to choosing mother boards and processors:

There are current (released Q1 2014) CPUs in the Xeon and i5 (i5 has 
turbo) lines (atom too, for a good headless system - with 8 cores?) that 
come without Intel® Turbo Boost Technology or Intel® Hyper-Threading 
Technology. Better yet, they are cheaper too. I don't know how easy they 
are to come by though. See:

http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t&TBTVersion=No&HyperThreading=false


So for an audio system start with the chip and find out what socket you 
need, then go looking for a matching MB.

I don't know what the difference is between the i5 and xeon once the 
extras have been stripped off. But at least the chip price is pretty much 
dead even.

The new atoms have an intel hd graphics proc for easier access to drivers 
than the older ones. The big problem with the atom is the MB tend to small 
with only one pci(e) slot. Both the atom and the xeon seem to be addressed 
towards server use and are know to have reasonable low latency 
performance.

I too will be looking at updating my music computer (P4 single core 5 PCI 
slots, 2.5G ram, USB 2, etc, etc, but good latency). I would realy like to 
stay away from having to use a USB or FW audio IF. In fact I would like to 
be able to continue to use my delta 66 for as long as I can before I spend 
more money :)  The list of PCIe audio IFs is pretty small and the music 
stores don't seem to want to stock them... I guess musicians don't know 
how to open a computer. The audio science ASI 554* boards are kind of 
expensive (8 i/o ~ $1000),  but the same could be said for RME stuff... 
about the same price (by the time an adat box is added). The computer is 
going to be the cheap part in any case.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net