I was able to get in touch with the person at Yamaha who writes the MR816 driver…here was his reply:
This is because of our FW driver’s specification.
Our FW driver is always managing data at regular intervals, and it is shown
as “spike” in task manager.
However, practically it is NOT done every a few sec, but a few msec
(equally). Because of “task manager”
data sampling rate, it will be shown every a few sec spike.
We don’t think it will cause “Audio Glitch”.
One more thing, Cubase ASIO engine will start right after Cubase starts
(even you don’t create any audio track).
So, as a result, we think this is “normal” behaviour with our FW driver and
it won’t affect audio performance.
(Even looks not so healthy in Task Manager…)
-------In all fairness even though I am seeing taskmanager spikes that do not look good I am NOT experiencing any problems with audio glitches, etc… and my composing template is huge with high cpu load in general.