Quick: you’ve got to sell UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC’s) to a mass market! How to do it? Well, Intel decided to show off pro audio and music production on the Linux-based Transmission, from Trinity Audio, as we saw earlier this week. I’m not entirely sure what got Intel thinking our geeky way, but I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts. And in all seriousness, Linux really an ideal OS choice here, because of its ability to be customized to the application.

The other flipside: low-power is the future. Computers now suck up 15% of the electricity in the US — electricity that produces a lot of our pollution and greenhouse gases. You do the math. A lot of that power gets used up in data centers, but the aggregate of all those homes counts, too. That will impact the future of all end-user operating systems.

Trinity has sent us some photos of the Intel booth at CES. Yes, Linux audio is getting some wider exposure. And even if you’re attached to Mac or Windows as your desktop/laptop platform, a mobile Linux device could be an ideal companion in the near future. We’ll have a chance to look at Trinity’s own device next week at NAMM and see how it stacks up.

Macworld, naturally, spends a lot of time focused intently on Apple hardware while I get distracted by beatboxing parrots and modular synthesizers built out of yarn and rubber bands. They have an excellent write-up of the significance of the MacBook Pro Santa Rosa upgrades, with comments on their benchmarks of the equivalent refreshed MacBooks:

MacBook Pro knows the way to Santa Rosa

One thing I was a little unclear on in my previous story is what matters in Santa Rosa, Intel’s latest architecture platform. (They didn’t call it Core 3 Duo, but then, consistent branding and Intel don’t generally go together.) As with Core 2 Duo over Core Duo, we’re getting incremental performance enhancements relative to the previous generation. Each step is relatively small, but they start to add up — hence, Apple quotes 50% gains over the original Core Duo. (And that’s why they dumped PowerPC, which in the mobile space was starting to practically paddle backwards.)

The key differences as far as raw performance: faster front-side bus (800MHz instead of 667), which for audio is a big deal, faster clock speeds on the models themselves at the same price, and fast RAM, plus a faster GPU for GPU-related tasks. (And, um, any day now we’ll start to see audio on the GPU — it’s tough to program, and GPUs are only now becoming the norm, and CPU cycles are getting cheaper, but it will happen.)

Also, none of this was meant to say “eBay your MacBook Pro.” PowerBook G4, maybe, but the first-gen MacBook Pro is still a terrific audio machine, with a GPU that’s no slouch. My main laptop right now is a first-gen MacBook (no Pro), and it blazes through everything I throw at it.

In this new series, we feature guest writers from the industry to answer questions about music technology. First up is Cakewalk’s Steve Thomas, with an exclusive on multiple CPU cores. You’ve seen multiple-core systems like the current Core Duo Macs and Core Duo or AMD x2 PCs, but what do these really mean for music creation? PC magazines regularly explain that they aid in performance “if you’re running a virus check in the background”, but in fact that’s only the beginning for music. Take it away, Steve. -PK

What is multi-core, anyway, and what does it matter for music creation?

For some time now, high-end PCs have come with the option of multiple processors. Traditional single-core computer architecture features a single CPU which does all of the work. In a DAW application, the computer needs to do lots of work in a very short amount of time. There are two ways to get more work out of your computer: use a faster CPU, or use more CPUs. Today’s multi-core processors offer the best of both worlds. Each core can do its own independent processing, but because they are on the same physical silicon chip, they can do it even faster.

Adobe seems to have baffled the Mac community by announcing that its upcoming audio utility Soundbooth, profiled here earlier this week, would run on Intel Macs but not PowerPC Macs. MacInTouch immediately cried foul, and suddenly the Mac world, having spent the past year yelling at Adobe for not releasing Intel-native code, has begun yelling at Adobe for releasing code only for Intel.

The first response came over the weekend from Adobe’s John Nack on his personal blog, waxing largely philosophical about why it made sense to support the newer Intel Macs instead of the PowerPC platform Apple themselves had abandoned. Now, I’ll be the first to concede Mac users can be hotheaded, but I think the better response would be to cut straight to the technical reasons why Adobe’s developers made this choice. Mac users assume, because they’ve been told so repeatedly by Apple, that creating universal applications is a “checkbox-clicking affair.” You can see a comment to that effect in the extensive discussion Mr. Nack triggered on his site.

Adobe audio product manager Hart Shafer chimes in today with the simpler technical answer:

UPDATED: I’ve gotten additional details straight from the source, with specifics on specs, design concept, and software from the Trinity device’s creators; see our updated report.

LinuxDevices.com has an extended report on a new all-in-one recording device built with Linux; it’s been met by skeptical readers at Engadget and Music thing. There’s little point in spending a whole lot of energy now worrying about this product as it’s right now only a series of product renderings and a largely vague website. It’ll probably appeal to someone, with a large, built-in LCD screen, portable form factor, integrated XLRs, and the ability to run Linux audio software, and while US$999 MSRP sounds high, there are other recording workstations in that ball park without the software features. But would-be buyers are understandably unenthusiastic given they can simply opt for a laptop or tablet. Yes, that’s less mobile — but it’s also far more capable, and for many users, that’s well worth a little extra space.

Then again, you might want to look beyond this product alone. There are many reasons to be skeptical about the Trinity box, but the more interesting story here is that this could be the first of many mobile music and audio devices to run chips from ARM and TI and the Linux OS.