The older computers also ran around 1 to 4 megahertz (MHz), whereas the Raspberry Pi runs at 700 MHz. And the Raspberry Pi is far from the average home PC. Today, boxes with 2 GB RAM and 2 GHz processor speed are common.
ASIO is a standardized way of describing the communication between audio software and a piece of audio hardware. It enables audio hardware manufacturers to write optimized drivers for their hardware that bypass the potentially high latency operating system mechanism for supporting audio hardware.
brundlefly James, you need to do a little research on ASIO Direct Monitoring. It's a standard tha allows an ASIO host to enable hardware monitoring in an interface that supports it. This bypasses The A/D/A converters and is true, zero-latency direct monitoring.