Here is an interesting excerpt from an SSL post on GearSlutz :
“Computers are getting faster and faster. They’re not going to stop getting faster either. Power is no longer a problem – even for those with 3 or 4 year old computers. The limiting factor for any DSP-assisted system these days is the environment that it has to work in. With Soundscape (as an example) it is written from the ground up to work with DSP processing so you can get latencies of only 4 samples running plug-ins. In an AU/ASIO system latency is driven by the buffers of the host application (which invariably was not written for DSP-assisted signal processing but for host CPU processing) and this is one of the downsides of things like Duende, UAD, Powercore et al. So looking forwards at this we at SSL decided that unless you are in an absolute mission-critical application a Native system is more than adequate for the job of making music. Rather than develop a new hardware platform for Duende we came to the conclusion that most people just wanted Native plug-ins.
I can confirm that we are working on Duende Native. We will be rolling out a public-beta test phase in the next 4-8 weeks and will be looking for people to join in. Register onto SSL’s mailing list to find out when.“