Sure, but when you are running a Blofeld or a Virus you're running ONE Blofeld or ONE Virus.bmrzycki wrote: Both the Access Virus Snow and the Waldorf Blofeld were released in 2008. The Access Virus Snow uses the Freescale DSP 56321 processor that operates at 275MHz and the Waldorf Blofeld uses the Freescale DSP56371 core operating at 181MHz. The DSP56371 documentation lists it's rough performace at 181 MIPS. Granted, these chips are designed and tuned for digital signal processing. Even so, these chips are almost 7 years old. That's ancient in the computing world.
Sure, you have the overhead of a generalized OS and the core isn't optimized for DSP workloads, but today's mediocre handheld ARM CPUs are much better than this.
In the right programmer's hands modern ARM processors from Apple or Samsung give us plenty of processor power for VA synth designs. We're really lucky to be honest.
In the iPad, you are fortunate if you can run like five instances of a simple synth at the same time inside some application that takes all the OS for itself.
In a computer running Windows or OS X, you are running a DAW with like 40 instances of several synths AT ONCE, usually quite more complex and better quality than the ones available on iPad, several signal processors, like EQs, compressors, reverbs, etc., recording and playing back audio live on top of that, and you are pissed when the machine tells you about CPU overload.
I don't think these things can be compared