SAN JOSE — Here at NVIDIA's Editor's Day event today, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang addressed questions about the company's plans for a possible second spin of its popular but ill-fated SoundStorm audio solution. Apparently, a reprise of SoundStorm will happen. Huang told the assembled press types, "We're gonna build SoundStorm 2. It's gonna be awesome." He was less clear on what form the next SoundStorm would take, saying that NVIDIA was still trying to figure out how to deliver SoundStorm as a product. Huang said, cryptically, that the new SoundStorm "will come in a way that you won't expect."
In the same Q&A session, Huang spoke about NVIDIA's history with the NV1 "media processor" chip, which had built-in sound as well as graphics. He disputed that notion that NVIDIA is primarily a "graphics company," and then suggested that the GPU is going to evolve and expand beyond graphics to include other kinds of digital media.
Based on all of that, it doesn't sound to me like the next SoundStorm is likely to find its way into a future nForce chipset. Instead, some future GeForce seems like a more likely place for SoundStorm to appear, as strange as that sounds. Of course, it's all speculation at this point, but in one form or another, SoundStorm will someday return.
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