Just some thoughts - corrections, suggestions, idle trolling most welcome.
Much of our contemporary PC architecture rests on standards laid down in the 80s. Digital audio and "multimedia" systems came later and still today it's like digital audio was an afterthought.
My first PC was built by a mum and dad shop in 1996. The CPU clock speed was 133MHz. It had a soundblaster clone 16 bit PCI sound card. It had a "Turbo" button on the front of the beige case. I looped and overlaid samples for some terrible sounding protosongs in CoolEdit95, downloaded from Tucows. Today we disable Turbo and limit our clocks to a lousy /sarcasm 3.7GHz.
My past 2 systems have both performed best at the same JACK settings: 256 frames, 3 periods, 48kHz. In that time the clock speed has risen a lousy (not /s) 700MHz. That's the same internal latency for 10 years.
It seems that digital audio is still an afterthought when it comes to what our DAWs are doing at the hardware level and this is a legacy within contemporary x86-64 builds that harks back to the IBM days. Before the Soundblaster!
So, I'm wondering if something like RISC-V and open source hardware will change the scene. Will it ever be possible to build a DAW around the audio I/Os and processing, rather than around a monolithic, all seeing, almighty, holy CPU? A CPU which cares as much for your audio as anything else it's doing.
Will I still be on 256/3 in ten years? Does it matter? What improvements do you see ahead?