Apple M1

[Joost Schuttelaar]

So, those benchmarks arriving today are quite impressive. I can’t wait for Apple to set up a system with four of these little monsters, perhaps with a secondary set of off-chip RAM slots (maybe SSD speeds are fast enough anwyay?).

The baseline specs of Mac’s jumped a lot too — now a measly MacBook Air is on par with the fastest Intel MacBook Pro, with a bunch of ML-cores to spare. Will be interesting to see what audio stuff will be run on those (e.g. instrument separation?). It also doesn’t bode well for DSP-hardware boards, they are now obviously just electricity wasting dongles.

Plugin compatibility will be limited I expect. So when I upgrade to ARM I’ll probably downgrade my current machine (MacBook Pro 2018) to Mojave. Still got some old tracks with 32-bit only plugins.

Hmm, now we also know why they dropped support for 32-bit in Catalina...

Coincidentally I just received an old AGP-video card so I can revive my old Athlon XP 2400 Windows XP machine running Sonar… I religiously backed up all my old tracks & WIPs, but never bounced them to audio (arrrghhhhh). And also never backed up all those downloadaed plugins (double yaarrrgghh), so that’ll be a fun challenge to get some of them playing again…

Cheers,

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Joost Schuttelaar
The Hague, NL