What Affects Latency in Music Production?

[WadeofEarth]

I've been doing some googling and I cant seem to find a straight answer to what part of a cpu affects latency in music production the most. I know there are a lot of factors in the entire build, but I am specifically focusing on the processor right now. 

[George.]

lower CPU speed for the most part, I assume. Other things that could affect latency:

-cheap mobo           

-faulty drivers

-cheap audio adapter 

In terms of CPU:

-some models still have higher latency with hyper-threading turned on. It's caused by not so optimized workflow management of the architecture (basically imperfect timings of tasks scheduled by the main thread and assigned to the secondary ones.

-(not CPU but pretty impactful) RAM CAS Latency. Especially in multi-channel setup. it adds up if you use up all the available RAM by pre-loading huge assets of data /instrument libraries, etc;/...

-some architectures have lower latency of execution than others.

-lack of SSE2 instructions (I've seen weird latency issues on some apps)

-low L1,2 cache size, combined with a large L3. (although these mistakes are not really found on consumer chips anymore)

-of course not to forget the load the CPU is put under. If it's not as up to the task as another one would be, the higher cpu usage (especially if maxed out) will increase the latency.

Sometimes incompatibility with the other components could cause increased latency and weird random lag spikes.

-probably many other variables inside the cpu, these are the ones I can come up with as of now.

 

Overall however, I believe the CPU alone wouldn't cause too much trouble (if it's up to the task), compared to the rest of the components. Probably mobo quality and component compatibility is far more important.