popular but ill-fated hardware-accelerated audio processor

Only place it was popular was in TR. If the market supported it, it would still be around today. Low sales=Low revenue=dead product. My understanding was the only neat thing was DD.

Most people don't care about the audio part of their PC. They are happy with the onboard sound, they don't mind connecting 3 cables to get surround sound. Creative, nvidia and other can only target gamers with their products (most musicians still don't consider soundblaster as high end cards).

I liked my nforce2 mobo, and I might consider going for an other solution giving me DDL, be it a PCI soundcard (maybe the X-plosion), or a mobo, or even an PCIe videoboards with integrated audio. But it won't be a mass market for some time.

Maybe HDMI cables can change this for the videocard solution in a year or two. But then I don't like this HDMI anti-consummer stuff, that forces me to replace my newly bought LCD, and makes me think twice about buying a new TV set (do I need to have HDMI 1.1, 1.2 or 1.3 equipment to get video+audio over the cable??)

Technically i'm pretty sure nvidia is capable of producing such a solution, and what is more, the 2$ DD Licence won't be a major factor for those super high priced videoboards at over 500$, not like for those sub-100$ mobo.

man....why ppl here care about a vaporware console with an outdated GFX card ?

like #4 say...Cell was announced as the do-it-all CPU for consoles...so Sony is so crazy to barely use this Cell CPU doing just gameplay..ummm ? :-o give me a break! Lets talk back when PS3 is out. if EVER !!!!

Videocards with builtin sound looks to be inevitable. When Directx10 cards come rolling in next year, there will be quite a few that have HDMI connectors. And HDMI also happens to support audio output.

And having a small connector like HDMI will also take less bracket real estate to leave room for other video connectors.

I remember when they first talked about how Cell could do anything from audio to graphics.

Scott, another possability is that "RSX" encompasses the entire graphics subsystem and is not just a single graphics chip. I'm told that Sony will actually be looking to use a Silicon Image display output device for their TMDS/HDMI output, and with HDMI in use the sound sound needs to be synced and sent with the display output.

What happens if both sound and graphics require the same ressources?

I kinda like modularity when it comes to important stuff.

Soundstorm FTW!

Finally I can replace my Abit AN7 and step up to 64-bit!

Considering the speed of a typical DRAM is only 3.2GB/s, 25.6 is still very high for the processor alone. The more interesting part is the rather pokey speed of 22.4 GB/s for the VRAM, the 7800 is 38GB/s, 7900 is 51GB/s with 22.4 being closer to that of a 7600. I'd imagine this is a cost issue of course since those cards are priced as much as the whole ps3.

The RSX has access to main memory through the processor, I wonder if the RSX can access both system and vram simultaniously to achieve a higher peak throughput.

You know what happens when a specialized chip starts doing more then it is supposed to?

It becomes a CPU.

What I found interesting was the fact that the memory bandwidth to the cell processor was only 25 GB/s I thouhgt it was going to be closer to 100 GB/s

I would be first in line for a GeForce 7900 GTX with Soundstorm 2 inside.