Re: Looping with a Netbook?

[Rainer Straschill <moinsound@googlemail.com>]

Michael Peters schrieb:
> saw Kim Cascone's Dell Netbook yesterday and thought, I want one too, for
> looping and travelling. But would it have enough power (under Windows - 
>I'm
> a Windows user) to run Bidule and a whole bunch of plugins that are
> occasionally almost too much for my larger Vaio? those netbooks all seem 
>to
> have 1.6GHz and an Atom processor and a friend said he thinks it would be
> too weak for music purposes. Any experiences anyone
Phew, there's so many variables!

I'd like to split that into three questions:
a) what is the processing power of current netbooks?
b) how "strong" (to use your use of words) must a computer be to be fit 
for music?
c) any other reasons which might disqualify a netbook for music stuff?

and I'll add d) for reference: my own experiences.

ad a):
the first generation of netbooks had an Atom N270 or sometimes N450 CPU 
- which is quite slow by today's standards. To put it in numbers, if you 
use the passmark (*) (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php), it's in 
the 300 range (bigger is better). To put that into perspective, typical 
normal-sized notebooks (e.g. 15/16'' display) in the mid price range 
(say, €500-600) come in a range between roughly 1500-2700, and I'd 
assume your larger Vaio may be in that ranger, if it's either a current 
model from that price range or an older model with a higher price tag 
originally.

However, the second generation of netbooks has somewhat more power under 
the hood: in the low price range, they start out with Atom N570 (642) 
and a little higher (we're looking at the €300-350 range now) with a 
Celeron U3400 (940) or X2 Neo (in the 800-1000 range). If you take it 
for comparison towards the prices of the notebooks we looked at before, 
you're moving forward into the 1500 range. That you stay below the much 
higher performance of the notebook-family top performers doesn't come as 
a surprise: with netbooks, low power consumption and low heat 
dissipation are prime requisites even in the "power" class, so you're 
getting equally advanced, but differently optimized CPUs here.

For completeness, if you're willing to spend more than €3k, you also get 
netbooks above a passmark of 3700...

Summarized: even entry-level netbooks of today are much faster than 
those well known first generation models equipped with an Atom N270. 
However, for the more advanced models, the performance-to-price ratio is 
still better for normal-sized computers.

ad b):
perhaps looking at your actual requirements might be possible: what kind 
of CPU/architecture does your mentioned Vaio have, and at which number 
does it come out in comparison to today's netbooks? And do you see a 
possibility to strip down your current setup (e.g. by relying on less 
cpu-intensive plugins)? That's something only you can answer - but the 
performance figure of your current computer would be a good starting 
point. Then turn off anything you don't really need and see where the 
cpu load comes out. Multiply that with you computer's passmark, add a 
safety margin, and compare with the figures from a).

ad c):
if you're using USB peripherals, you should be safe. Care must be taken 
with other things; a lot of netbooks come without an Express slot, those 
which do often have a bad implementation (DPC latency wise), and only a 
few have ieee1394 (and their dpc latency needs to be checked, as well)

Finally d):
started with a Pentium M 2.0 (passmark 503), which ran Ableton Live 4, 
Möbius, several processing plugins (most of them lightweight: Ableton 
reverb, MadShifta, SupaTrigga) and some serious softsynths (Pro53, FM7, 
Kontakt, PPG Wave), and it worked fine - if I always kept in mind to 
turn off plugin x before activating plugin y.
Now I'm using a Core i7-740-equipped computer (in the 3500 range), with 
fewer plugins at that, and of course it works just fine...

Yours,

Rainer

*: I'd like to avoid getting into a discussion about a proper 
metric/measure for computer/CPU performance. First of all, the CPU is 
not all that counts, then the benchmark you use may not tell you 
everything. However, it's a first starting point, especially for that 
application (which mostly stresses CPU).



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