With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there.
Not true. Try running a really complicated Logic set with a lot of virtual instruments on a low-end machine and watch it grind to a halt. In the last year we've seen new virtual instruments that bring analog emulation to a new level but they can eat as much as half of my Macbook Air's CPU playing a single note. Extrapolate this to a professional mix with as many as a hundred tracks and you can see why some people still need a real computer.
This is true, there is still a gulf in performance requirements between something that needs to run a browser and angry birds and something that will be used for high end gaming (or game dev) and stuff like Music, CAD , Video creation.
Assuming that we can keep cranking the moore's law handle in one way or another people will always find a way to use that extra power even if the rate of return is somewhat logarithmic there is always a wow factor in something that is better even if only by a marginal amount.
The question I guess becomes how much of this can we move to the cloud? If the math for the virtual instruments in this example could be run inside a data centre and then streamed to the computer , perhaps some of the need for high end local hardware is alleviated.
Of course this will be cyclical , we move to a world where software is something that is paid for by the month and after a while of paying lots of different monthly fees for different apps somebody will start offering people a "local cloud" that will look like a great deal because you only pay once.
If the math for the virtual instruments in this example could be run inside a data centre and then streamed to the computer , perhaps some of the need for high end local hardware is alleviated.
Music is a particularly difficult case because latency is an absolute killer. If your response time is over about 10-20 milliseconds people will start to complain. You could farm out offline rendering I suppose but so far it's a lot easier to build a big beefy workstation and freeze tracks to audio if necessary on the local disk.
> Try running a really complicated Logic set with a lot of virtual instruments on a low-end machine and watch it grind to a halt.
Barking up the wrong tree, mate. Obviously he won't try it, because he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about - and certainly never heard of Logic.
Not true. Try running a really complicated Logic set with a lot of virtual instruments on a low-end machine and watch it grind to a halt. In the last year we've seen new virtual instruments that bring analog emulation to a new level but they can eat as much as half of my Macbook Air's CPU playing a single note. Extrapolate this to a professional mix with as many as a hundred tracks and you can see why some people still need a real computer.