I think modern general purpose CPUs are perfectly capable of low latency and jitter. The problem isn't the CPU, the problem is stuff around the CPU (mostly the

I think modern general purpose CPUs are perfectly capable of low latency and jitter. The problem isn't the CPU, the problem is stuff around the CPU (mostly the operating system). The less deterministic aspects of modern CPUs (branch prediction, speculative execution, caches etc). happen at timescales much smaller than what you usually care about (and possibly smaller than the jitter specs on microcontrollers).