Preferable Processor Characteristics?

[danierusan]

Hi there,

If looking to purchase a CPU for the purposes of very low latency midi triggering – what should we specifically look for in a cpu?

High clock frequency?
Multiple cores?
A certain architecture?
Large L2/L3 cache?

Looking around the web all I see is ‘the faster/more powerful the better’ but thats a sledgehammer approach.

Some nitty gritty details would be great!

D

Topic

[John]

I’d say you’ll be fine with just about any fairly new processor. You will want RAM, though.
Most important is your choice of Audio/MIDI Interface. Well-written ASIO drivers for it, together with that new processor and at least 8GB of RAM will get you great performance.
Historically, RME has made interfaces and drivers that get you low latency but even my Avid MBox Pro gets me down to a H/W Buffer Size of 32 samples.

Hopefully, someone that has tried a few interfaces will chime in on that part.

John Rammelt - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Author]

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