High-end MacOS and Windows PCs blow away the Geekbench scores for typical laptops.
The Mac Mini computers included in Apple’s Developer Transition Kit are not intended to be production computers, and are arguably built with half-baked hardware.įor musicians, it remains to be seen how well Apple’s in-house chips scales up for higher-performance systems.
MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016) Geekbench: Geekbench stats show the Developer Kit Mac Mini beating our MacBook Pro in single-core performance and offering comparable Multi-Core performance: The Macbook Air is an entry-level machine, so, as a point of comparison, we checked benchmarks on one of Synthtopia’s Mac laptops, a 15-inch Late 2016 MacBook Pro.
Geekbench is a cross-platform tool that’s designed to measure your device’s CPU and GPU Compute performance. Geekbench metrics of the prototype Apple Silicon Mac in Apple’s Developer Transition Kit show that a Mac with a repurposed iPad chip, running Geekbench in emulation mode via Rosetta, has better Multi-Core Geekbench performance than a 2020 Macbook Air running on an Intel Core i3 processor. The first prototypes of Macs running Apple Silicon are now out in the wild, and speed tests are starting to appear that suggest that performance worries may be overblown. While there are many valid concerns about issues like compatibility, speed bumps in the transition process and the ultimate loss of legacy applications, many readers also fundamentally questioned whether the chip designs that Apple has developed for over a decade to run iOS and its variants are powerful enough to run a ‘real OS’. For modulation, an envelope and LFO are included.Apple‘s June 22nd announcement that it was dumping Intel CPU’s and moving the Macintosh to internally developed ‘Apple Silicon’ raised a lot of red flags for some readers. The 6580 version includes six curve models as well. The filter is an analog, multimode resonant filter that can be set to low-pass, band-pass, high-pass, or any combination of the three. When an oscillator is set to the Triangle waveform (or Tri+Pulse), it can use another oscillator as a carrier frequency to produce ring modulation, which can produce bell-like metallic sounds and effects.Įach oscillator has its own envelope generator, which allows an ADSR envelope to be applied to the volume, as well as a PWM envelope and LFO, and a pitch envelope and LFO, all with independent timing and sync values. Also, any oscillator can be synchronized to the frequency of another to produce a "Hard Sync" effect. The Pulse, Sawtooth, and Triangle waves can be enabled in any combination, giving rise to a unique set of extra waveforms. Together with inSIDious innovative "SFX" button, this can be an amazing tool for creating classic sound effects.
The Noise waveform is a digital pseudo-random noise generator that can be pitched up and down and sounds characteristically "8-bit". The Pulse waveform's width can be set to any one of 4096 positions representing the complete range from pure square to a pulse thin enough to be silent. The SID chip (and by extension inSIDious) has three independent digital oscillators that generate 4 fundamental waveforms: Pulse, Sawtooth, Triangle, and Noise.
Instead, it is a re-implementation of every feature of the chip as accurately as possible this includes even 'bugs' and quirks which help give the chip its iconic sound! So, he took it upon himself to create his own emulation to be as close as possible to the real thing.Īs a result, inSIDious is unlike the many 'SID-like' VSTs in existence, which have the basic waveforms and little else. It was this music that set him on his career path, giving him huge respect for and admiration of the SID chip and the sounds that it could produce.Īfter using SID sounds in many productions over the years, Mike felt that none of the existing VST emulation attempts were anywhere near suitable as a replacement for his HardSID Quattro sound card (containing 4 actual SID chips). InSIDious has been developed over 5 years by Mike Clarke, a veteran video game musician and programmer, who spent his formative years playing Commodore 64 games and listening to their music.