Today, at Snapdragon Summit, we made a few announcements that will be of interest to those looking to make music on powerful laptops with long battery life, quiet (or no) fans, and great performance.

First is a native in-box ASIO driver and low-latency UAC2 driver coming next year. Second are native hardware-specific drivers from Focusrite and Yamaha, both coming to Arm64 early next year.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/windo...ic-on-windows/

We also demonstrated a preview of Cubase, native on Arm64 with the native prototype ASIO driver. The latency was low enough to comfortably play guitar in real-time, despite everything being in preview.



In addition, REAPER is available for Arm64 in beta *today*, and Reason will be available first in emulation early next year, and later native for Arm64.

Dim Sigalas from Steinberg is there in Hawaii, demonstrating Cubase on Snapdragon for the press in the demo area, and Qualcomm even had a guitar skinned with the Snapdragon logo, and printed up custom picks so that the press can try the low-latency audio themselves. All together, it's quite a show.

Pete

Thanks

The ASIO driver we're putting in box isn't an ASIO4All-type wrapper, so it's tied to the new low-latency USB Audio Class 2 driver.

There's no audio class standard for PCIe or Thunderbolt, so those will still need to be vendor drivers. I looked into what it would take to define a standard a long time ago, and it was WAY too much work for me to even consider at the time. Maybe in the future.

Pete

For those of us a moderate IQ (me): Do all software providers need to either adjust code or recompile for this or can it run in some sort of emulated environment?

I'm thinking mainly of 3rd party providers for the DAWs, i.e. plugin vendors and more.

Yes and no, but mostly yes.

We have the Prism emulator which lets you run x86-64 code on Arm64 devices. It works quite well, but not for super performance-sensitive stuff like a DAW. Additionally, there are some instruction sets it does not emulate, so if the DAW is using certain vector instructions, they'll do much better by porting natively.

But if the DAW is compiled to Arm64EC*, like Cubase and REAPER are, and Reason will be, then they can load Intel/AMD 64 bit plugins into their process on Arm64 devices. Same limitations apply. The only thing I run into there, though, is that some installers don't work on Arm64 at all, especially older ones. So YMMV (and there are sometimes workarounds like installing on x64 first and then copying the files over, and doing some magic). But you don't have to go chuck out all your plugins and buy new ones just to run on Arm.

One important note: iLok isn't yet working on Arm64. We're working with them.

* https://devblogs.microsoft.com/windo...using-arm64ec/

Pete

Got it.

The use-case I'm thinking of is for post-production using Nuendo, and in post we typically end up with a fair amount of more or less 'esoteric' 3rd party software, ranging from denoising and restoration plugins/suites to metering to spatial processing and more.

In other words while Nuendo is a pretty complete solution all of what a lot of us do might not be able to be done on one of these devices until that support is there. Just in terms of investing in a new portable for example it makes it less of an obvious choice... for now.

Anyway, great to see this.

:-)

It's a case-by-case decision. A lot of stuff runs really well under emulation. The "EC" in Arm64EC means "Emulation Compatible". The host (Nuendo/Cubase) runs native Arm64 instructions, at 100% native speed/performance. Only the x64 binaries/plugins are running under emulation, unmodified.

Pete

Understood. Thanks Pete.

@ Psychlist1972 Pete, does this mean a windows ARM Laptop will have a low latency ASIO driver for the on board sound like a MBP?

This will be great for windows users as that's one thing that's always been an issue using a window laptop.


M

USB first. I had discussions with a number of companies about on-board audio and they all seemed to their the ASIO drivers shipped with DAWs was good enough. I've never used those, so it's on my list to look into this once the USB project is well in hand and Windows MIDI Services has shipped the first release.

I do agree that the plane/train/coffee shop scenario is something we want to make sure works well.

Pete

You can tell them that only cubase ships with a generic ASIO driver and it doesn’t work well.

Other DAWs can use WASAPI if you’re lucky, otherwise you have to use FlexASIO or ASIO4All

pete, it's not just the plane/train/coffe shop though. I use the on board sound with my MBP when playing live.

I plug my midi keyboard in direct USB and my Korg controller and that's it. I can run at 64 samples with Core audio and have a mini jack to balanced stereo L-R cable that goes to the desk.

Simpe setup and no need for an audio interface. For live the on board sound is fine quality wise.

I also can run my headphones without a need for an audio interface whe working away from the studio so NOT needing to drag an audio interface around is a big plus for the MBP


M

Nice, and a good example. Thanks.

Pete

Cooper Carter and Dom Sigalas playing live in the press demo tents at Snapdragon Summit. Both are on preview Cubase 13 and the prototype ASIO driver on Copilot+ PCs.

https://www.instagram.com/snapdragon...l/DBbxzqxpLTc/

Pete

Another great video, this one a bit longer and showing the full press demo from Dom and Cooper. Starts at about 3:52 in.



Pete

Are these drivers lower latency than the amd64 ones?

Native device-specific drivers will likely be right about the same as the Intel/AMD x64 ones on average.

Too early to say where our class driver falls when it comes to RTL. It'll be good, but given it works across *all* USB Audio Class 2 devices, it's entirely possible it'll be a fraction slower, much like how Apple's in-box driver is today vs the third-party ones available there.

DAWbench will be a good way to test all this

Pete

Video with Robin Vincent



Pete

Where in Hawaii is this? Nothing, not a single whisper was said to the local music press or studio networks....crazy

Ahh....Maui, that explains it. Bummer! Would have liked to see some old friends.

Qualcomm, like most big tech companies, has a pretty standard cohort of tech press and influencers they invite to things like that.

Pete

I just saw that it was on Maui, so even if they were talking, that island is the most bizarrely insular. You have all these mainland and foreign people who only
Talk to each other and take great pains not to interact with or include the locals. And then you have the other side of the island which still feels like part of the Hawaii community. It’s really a weird situation.

But all this is exciting news! I asked Justin Frankel about the subject matter. This sounds so awesome!

They pick the island because it's apx halfway between US and Asia. They do a ton of stuff with companies in Japan, China, Korea, etc. And so they invite press from there as well.

Pete

Oahu is like 20 miles away as is the big island. I understand that when tourists think of Hawaii, they mean Maui, but the majority of infrastructure is on Oahu along with the bigger hospitals, airports and critical infrastructure.

It’s always a sore spot with local industry as the insular Maui culture ( and really it’s only a small part of Maui that does this, but it’s the one that gets all the goodies) consistently shuts out and ignores them.

I get that they invite press from everywhere. I wish that they would invite press from Hawaii as well though I have personally seen the Maui ivory tower say they’re the only ones that matter so, no need.

This sounds promising and also years-away from having broad software/hardware support on Windows/ARM
.

I don't understand this comment.

Pete

Do you have an idea on what notebook Cubase is running in that video ?( Is that a prototype ? Already available ?) Thanks

The laptops are already available.

Cooper was playing on a Surface Laptop 7 15" with the Snapdragon X Elite, IIRC. That's the same I have, but in black. It comes in up to 64GB 1TB. Mine is 32GB 1TB.

I forget which device Dom was using. It may be the Dell Latitude (Snapdragon X Elite)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell...4-7455-laptop/

The Qualcomm prototype units tend to be bright red.

Both were using Steinberg IXO 22 USB audio interfaces and Yamaha HS-series speakers. Dom also used a Reface CS for the controller keyboard.

Dom's Setup



Cooper's Setup



They were both on all day, for two days, with back-to-back performances out in super hot and humid weather, with zero problems.

And by outside, I really mean it. Here's a photo from setup day



Pete

Wow , that is really promising , great news ! Thank you

What is the audio related performance like compared to an i7 10700k for instance?

I haven't seen any scientific comparisons. The performances I've seen, on beta versions of software and drivers, has been quite good.

But there have been no DAWbench-style performance tests done.

Pete