The best CPU for Maschine

Maschine is able to use more cores. What Maschine does in a strange way is the use of hyperthreading.... Some people insist that Maschine does not use hyperthreading... My experience is it does use all cores (physical/virtual), but not to full capacity. Generaly it takes 50% of CPU power at most....

IHHO, AMDs are better choise than current Intels.... I have Ryzen 7 APU 5700G (8C/16T 4+ GHz with all cores full load - sustainable...) It is 65W CPU and it takes 85W at most. Most of time sub 40 W. It is easy to cool. And it has decent iGPU (better than Intels.)

5700G is somewhere in between M1 and M1 Pro.

Within few months ZEN 4 AMDs should come. It will have new socket and DDR5. AMDs do not change socket every day, one may use it for several CPU generations, so no problems to switch to stronger CPU that comes in three, four years. But it pays to buy motherboard from respectable manufacturer and not the cheapest one. Not all manufacturers update motherboard firmware/BIOS for new CPUs.... :-((((

Yes, but one may use Maschine HW and any DAW for orchestral....

And orchestral is not that CPU demanding, more RAM demanding. But Massive X is pretty CPU hungry, also many of reverbs, and Komplete Light Series is pretty CPU intensive (heavy use of reverbs), ....

M1 might do, but what about long term compatibility? And learning and maintaining one more OS.... And rather linited RAM and SSD? But passive cooling is attractive. But one might use 15W APUs from AMD and also cool it passively... It would be at least as strong like M1, one could have more RAM and SSD size which suits needs and Windows...

While my AMD 5700G has active cooling, it is very quiet (using Noctua low profile cooler) and small (15x15x8 cm).

Mac is very much the standard for music making, the fact you stated that tells a lot.

I mainly use Windows myself, but our studio HAS to have Macs in it, otherwise clients will not want to work there, that is a fact.

Mac not being standard in studios has nothing at all to do with Soundwide not pushing funds and development time at porting to AS, NI software is second fiddle to PA and Izotope, both of which ARE Apple Silicon and amount to a much bigger catalogue.

Mac IS studio standard, NI IS the only part of Soundwide that is not Apple Silicon, and that amounts to one of two things, either NI was purchased for IP and the current software will disappear entirely, or (and this is most likely) Soundwide only has real interest in a few pieces of NI software and the rest will go legacy after being sold off in cheap bundles (see Izotopes model, Plugin Boutique etc)

We know that Kontakt and Reaktor will make the cut, they both have 3rd party licencing to keep them alive, beyond those two and the library content, no other NI plugin/Software has any real guarantee of getting updates, even Reaktor is near enough a hobby project, Kontakt has been their only real money making software for a long time,why exactly do you think NI needed so many buyouts in recent years? because they were so financially secure?

Not only is some of their software extremely old and possibly based on libraries etc that will never be ported to Apple Silicon (Massive, Absynth, FM8) add to this all the plugins that were made by 3rd parties for NI, nobody knows how those will pan out in terms of architecture updating.

A good deal of NI's (not Kontakt based) products started out as Reaktor Ensembles and were later converted to self contained plugins. Early versions if Massive and FM8 can still be found in the Reaktor library. Latest example is Super 8, AFAIR. Some products remained Reaktor Ensembles based on special performance optimized modules/core cells (e.g. Monark, Razor, Prism etc).

Thus I’d expect porting Reaktor to be the key to many products, because it seems to actually be NI's in-house synth and effects IDE.

Are there any which are not just Kontakt libraries?