Nvidia readies Athlon 64 Soundstorm chip

Well-placed sources at TSMC Taiwan tell the INQUIRER that a chip, known as the SP10 but code named "Soundstorm" is under design at its labs.

The SP10 is a separate audio chip for all AMD K8 microprocessors.

It includes a DSP, hardware 2D and 3D acceleration and Dolby Digital real time encoding.

But it will also include the MCP-T audio processing unit (APU) specifications, and in addition will connect to a number of analogue CODECs said to be of the highest quality.

That doesn't mean Nvidia will dump soft audio. No siree. Nvidia will continue to support AC 97 in both its Crush K8 and Crush K8S chipsets. In addition, it's likely that Nvidia will phase in support for revision 2.3 during the rest of this year.

But our TSMC mole tells us that only CODECs on the AVL will be supported on the AMD 64 platforms. µ

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