Sugarite wrote:

Audio requires two things: hard drive access speed, and high CPU clock.
Every other aspect of a computer is not taxed heavily by audio DSP
processes. That includes system bus, ram, graphics, FPU, etc etc. What I
consider bare minimum for mixing in-the-box is 2GHz (or dual 1GHz). The
bitch with Apple is that they consistently make sure that their
stripped-down desktop models (eMac, iMac, Mac Mini etc) and their powerbooks
have NOT QUITE ENOUGH CPU. Now that convolution reverbs are becoming
standard, I'm bumping my minimum up to 2.4GHz, which means next month Apple
will release a 2GHz iMac... seriously, just watch.


Not entirely true. The Apple G4 & G5 have a technology they call
AltiVec or the Velocity Engine:

The Velocity Engine, embodied in the G4 and G5 processors, expands the
current PowerPC architecture through addition of a 128-bit vector
execution unit that operates concurrently with existing integer and
floating-point units. This provides for highly parallel operations,
allowing for simultaneous execution of up to 16 operations in a single
clock cycle. This new approach expands the processor's capabilities to
concurrently address high-bandwidth data processing (such as streaming
video) and the algorithmic intensive computations which today are
handled off-chip by other devices, such as graphics, audio, and modem
functions.The AltiVec instruction set allows operation on multiple bits
within the 128-bit wide registers. This combination of new instructions,
operation in parallel on multiple bits, and wider registers, provide
speed enhancements of up to 30x on operations that are common in media
processing.

The above is from the Apple developer site. If you can, go to an
Apple retailer or store with an MBox with you and try the latest
Powerbook. Make sure it has at least a gigabyte of RAM. PTLE on an
MBox can do multitrack mixes.

Good Luck,
Robert A. Ober