I sat thru a nice little demo tonight(thanks to Marshall Graphics and Kurt Howell) and came away with a new desire for HD/Native. From what I understand, the HD/Native card has some processing onboard that handles the mixer and IO, which takes a serious load off the CPU. They also explained that USB and firewire are much slower due to the fact that they move data in packets and are always doing double duty because they are constantly sending everything twice to make sure the data really went. That slows them both down a lot as compared to PCIe. Another cool option(if you have the cash) is that you can add the PCMCIA port to your desktop machine and keep the Native card in the baby Magma chassis, which allows you to grab and run when you want to go portable with your laptop, but still patch it to your studio/desktop system quick and easy, with no change in performance(other than the difference in computer horsepower when going with a laptop. They demo'd a 165 track session with video on a MBP i7 at a 128 buffer(about 65 plugins). Pretty darn impressive
When funds permit, I'll sign up
