I read a post where someone asks about future support of Ardour for Intel Atom, and part of the reply was that Atom is poor for floating point calculations.
How does this compare to the AMD G-series chips? Are they any better?
I have been looking at getting a fanless PC, and see that some ship with Intel Atom, and some with AMD G-series chips (the latter being found e.g. in the Mint Box and the like fanless PCs).
Would an AMD G-series powered machine be capable of being used for recording, using Jack and Ardour?
I don’t know what you want to do, but my recommendation is not to buy low powered CPUs for audio-stuff. I own a Intel Core 2 Duo 1,8 GHz CPU and for me it’s to slow…
It very much depends upon what you want to do, but from my own experience, once A3 is up and running, it consumes very little CPU (with no plugins, in which case floating point performance is less relevant) however it seems to require significant quantities of memory and other resources in order to haul itself off the disk and actually get everything together (much more so than A2, and even more so if you use 64Bit), otherwise it will take an age to start and most likely will disconnect from JACK several times before you can finally get it to successfully run. If the only reason for using a low power PC is to keep it quiet, advances in power supplies, storage and CPU coolers have now made it much easier to build a very high powered machine which is almost completely slient (though in an ideal world, the elegant solution should not simply be brute force adding more GHz, memory etc until the problems go away…).