Originally Posted By: justanoldmuso
simon. respect and thanks for the reply.
i fully understand if you can only give so much info out.
(eg an NDA in place.)
but my interest is "piqued".
some q's. / metrics that interest me.

1.from totally cold boot, (not sleep mode), how long to boot to desktop in secs.
2. how long in secs to boot from the desktop into biab ?
3. how long in secs to boot from the desktop into apps like garageband and logic pro ?
4. assuming a biab song 3 and a half minutes long with every trak an RT (no plug ins.)
how long to export the stereo song wav , once biab is instructed to do so.
5. is everything snappy and fluid ??



respect.
oldmuso.



I can't comment at all, because I haven't used it at all myself. There are a few benchmarks floating around though: https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/mac/apple-arm-powered-mac-mini-benchmark-developers/
A thing to keep in mind though is that since it's an ARM chip, any existing apps that aren't developed for ARM are gonna be running through Rosetta 2, and that can slow things down (much like Rosetta when Apple moved from PPC to Intel) as now you're having to emulate a CISC architecture on a RISC chip.


Originally Posted By: justanoldmuso

simon re dda console more respect lol.



Word!



Regarding refurb computers, every refurb I've ever bought has been well worth it. Refurb Mac computers, refurb HP desktops and laptops, refurb Lenovo, always good, and much faster and cheaper than something brand new.



Regarding USB4 for audio interfaces, I don't believe it's necessary. Companies have made sub-3ms interfaces on USB2 over a decade ago (Fireface UC as an example)! Certainly the higher data speed is good, but lets do the math - one channel at 24-bit 192khz is around 4.6mbps, and USB 2.0 is around 480mbps, so that's not an issue for a few dozen channels. Going further, at 480mbps a single 24-bit sample takes about 50 nanoseconds to transfer. USB 3.0 cuts those figures by 10, and USB 4.0 would cut it again by 8.

Realistically, you can expect USB2 to have a lot of overhead which can slow things down a little, but the big bottleneck with latency is always gonna be drivers and CPU.

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