Sure, and I apologize for my incoherent blabbering. I’m a guitar player first, computer enthusiast second and would-be audio engineer third, so take everything with a grain of salt.
When I built my DAW machine, I decided to go without discrete graphics, since I figured I didn’t need it (no gaming).
I have a Core i7 3770K Ivy Bridge, which has decent graphics built in, driving my two monitors. That chip uses an updated version of a functionality that Intel calls “QuickSync”. As i understand it, they use a part of the graphics circuitry for some video de/encoding tasks, and they do it VERY fast, about double what CUDA does or other graphics-based compute solutions. I actually bought a QuickSync enabled media compression program and I am very impressed with the speed.
I just figured that most modern DAW computers have either Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge or Haswell based chips in them, and most of those have that QuickSync engine built in. Why not use that part of the chip, as it is in there almost by default and with clearly documented APIs?
Steinberg is using Hyperthreading lately for ASIOGuard, so they are (of course) aware of modern CPU’s capabilities.
That’s all.
I get the argument though about precision and sloppy execution for critical audio tasks from circuits that were never meant to deal with that.
Cheers,
Benji