[skunark]

Perhaps you have noticed the recent announcement of the Intel Xeon Processor with an FPGA in the same package.   Here you have potentially a cache-coherent design that could provide a driverless bit-perfect solution to any digital media format at a really high frequency (i.e. very low jitter). 

We are talking about a bit-perfect analog conversion, perfect volume control, perfect room correction, at least to 128-bits.  The possibilities are really endless with the Xeon-FPGA solution, and for audio it really could just be an Atom core vs a Xeon Core.

Out of all the things I've heard this year, this is probably the most important announcement yet.   Not only for audio, but for HPC as well, NSA will have a heyday with thisl  Can you imagine PCM or DSD at 3-4 GHz?  (perhaps optimistic,but even at 1-2 GHz?)   Intel has lost the laptop and desktop battle vs tablets, but man this is a killer left hook.

For those that don't know what an FPGA offers, just consider this as a very flexible hardware solution that can be updated after every reboot.   


Jim

[Folsom]

Very cool.

For those of you don't know what this means, it's basically a chip that's more programmable in order to perform specific tasks.

In other words this chip could be your personal computer, but with a reboot could be configured to process video faster. It could also be used for electronic coin mining, potentially competing with the ASICS specific chips on boards setup, maybe even better on the ones not designed to work with cards. It could be done for yes, audio too. Basically it's whatever chip you want it to be, whenever you want it.

However* I doubt it'd be able to take over things like high end GPU's, as while it's programmable, some specific chips are so vastly different they don't really have anything in common with a CPU like chip. Just because the Xeon can do a lot of things, doesn't mean I expect it to dominate all of them.