Let me see if I got that right : Microsoft, for reasons unknown to the layman, decided to tie DirectX 10 to the CPU to "bypass the hardware with an additional abstraction layer", thus obfuscating everything and making Creative drive users nuts for upwards of 18 months after Vista was set upon the world with buggy sound drivers for its X-Fi.
Now Intel comes and says "Hey guys, all this actually does is increase the power drain, so let's hijack this and cut off all the surplus polling to the CPU which cannot go into low-power mode any more.", thus eliminating Microsoft's efforts at "abstraction", reducing power requirements and, in the end, making Microsoft backpedal on its DX10 specs to accommodate the new architecture.
All that because of some hippies groaning about global warming.
Ain't it nice to see that Microsoft can actually have its plans stalled every decade or so ?

Huh. This means nothing to me.

Yes, and then give us a eco friendly operating system to go with this new hardware. Let us all make a difference.

Even 3 Amigas didn't need that much juice! I distinctly remember my A500 plus came with a 40 watt power brick, 40x3=120. Still 10 watts under the 130 watt TDP you mentioned.

plus other sections built in like the memory controller, hard disk controller, etc, basically all the other chips on the motherboard should all be on the cpu.

Everthing still works ok on my Amiga at an amazing 7.2Mhz and 1MB of RAM. What can I say?

its a shame commodore made a *$$% of things in the eary 90's otherwise things would have been very different.




All that is fine for laptop/gamer/receiver/ipod quality audio, but there is still a need for affordable, audiophile-level Stereo cards to maximize 192/24 downloads. We don't need dsp enhancement - just get the raw data right, thanks! Cards still have too many capacitors in the analog signal path, not enough on the power rails, and excessive jitter - just like this year's receiver and last year's. Same poor implementation not improved by more Dolby or dbx codec logos. Do 2ch well instead of crap 7.1 with space and budget.

These audio DSPs need to support firmware updates for bug fixes and new codecs. Bugs limiting NIC IP offload and ICH9/10R SSD slowness might have been fixable with firmware.

is it half a giga or half a mega ?

Palladium anyone? :-D

On behalf of charlie I'd like to point out you completely forgot the mention of the processing required by the DRM on top of it all.