i presume that the wave meter core will be integrated directly into the silicon of their pc i/o products like the press release seems to say. see smsc.com for a description of the products. i mentioned earlier that a brand new bx-based intel motherboard that was shipped in a new dell had a FDC37B777 chip in it. as was my guess, this controls keyboard, parallel, serial, as well as pci power management wakeup, IR, floppy, and an ISA interface. i'm not sure if this is the ISA-PCI bridge in the dell. in any case, smsc.com talks about a 2 Mbps data rate on the "enhanced digital data separator", whatever that is. this certainly would NOT be the interface to the wave meter. obviously they'll have to have a full interface to the pci bus at the least to come close to being able to feed the encrypted 100Mbps that the wavemeter supposedly handles (not to mention the return of the unencrypted data). anyway, i'm sure they know what they are doing. let's let them worry about it :) point is, that big board makers like intel user their I/O chip product line so as long as dell insists that intel sell them a board with the wavemeter on it, we're in business.
so you asked about placing chips on chips? my guess is not exactly. they'll just integrate the wave core into their I/O core. this just means one bigger/better chip with both functionalities in it. no this would not be on a card. it would be directly on the motherboard.
about revenue sharing: my hope is that smsc doesn't get any. after all, by integrating more functionality into their chip, they can already charge a higher price and maybe raise their margins. they aren't the ones taking any risk, here. it is the boxmaker that chooses the motherboard with the enhanced I/O chip that takes the risk. certainly there is some risk for them in spending the bucks to design the new chip, but otherwise, none. american express doesn't share revenue with the company that prints their traveller's checks.
the boxmaker's, otoh, are the ones bundling the wavemetered pc with the wave-enabled cd's so understandably, they'll want a cut.
as far as the hauppauge coincidence, i sure it is just that. pretty funny, though :) |
