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Technology Stocks : Creative Labs (CREAF) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (9776)	2/15/1998 10:57:00 PM
From: Fred Mah	Respond to of 13925

Concerning the post, Message 3440198 "Michael - Re: "do you see the sound and or video board disappearing one day in the future? " Video displays are already on their way to Chip Sets and integrated CPUs (Intel's future i740+440BX and MediaGX) and the Media GX already has Soundblaster emulation. I would have to assume that audio functions will also be folded in to the chip set - it will permit the transfer from ISA based Soundlblaster legacy problems, even though several manufacturers are working on PCI compatible/Soundblaster compatible solutions. Of course, there will always be need of some external (to the CPU and Chip Set) analog functions." Actually, you can see this in the current soundcards in Creative's line. The acquired Ensoniq card is very, very basic and more or less provides only the A/D (analog sound domain to digital computer domain) and D/A (reverse situation) parts. This is what he refers to in his last sentence in the above quote, the "analog functions" The Ensoniq board uses the main CPU to perform virtually all the other functions of a soundcard. However, the Soundblaster AWE32,etc.. is a different thing. The E-mu8000 chip is specifically used for audio processing, and according to my estimates, and those of Dave Rossum (E-mu co-founder and co-designer of the 8000 chip), it would require a 200MHz or faster Pentium chip just to do the same features as the 8000 chip. So in that case we are talking about a $10-15 specific ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) versus a general purpose $100+ Pentium CPU. I would estimate it would take a 450MHz Pentium II or faster to do the same things as the newer E-mu10k1 chip. The big but is that most people, say 90% or more, don't need the extra ability of the audio processing chip. That's why lots of systems come with the Ensoniq card or other very low cost card (~$20 ESS types). I use the 8000 chip everyday for music, and to do the same thing with just the computer itself and a general card like the Ensoniq would require all the resources of my computer. The problem is that this does not advance the state of audio on the PC. If you examine the 3d graphics market, you will see what I mean. Once the games started using intensive 3d graphics it caused very poor performance in most computers because the CPU is not specifically tailored to calculate 3d graphics, thus over a dozen companies began designing these 3d ASIC chips such as the 3dfx Voodoo, etc... From the current standpoint, there is no way the 3d graphics function will move to the main CPU anytime soon, but almost the opposite has happened to the audio market. Audio has been neglected and as such, there has been little advancement in its usage (i.e. you could get away with hardware you got a few years ago and not notice much difference than most hardware today). It's the chicken and egg thing, most games include low quality audio because there was never any good standard or push to use CD quality sound, so then if no software requires high quality audio then no hardware will support it. If you push audio to the CPU, then the move for higher quality audio will begin to wane. That's why I say it is the opposite of what is happening with 3d graphics hardware. Microsoft has recently released their DirectMusic portion of DirectX features, this could potentially bring more dedicated audio hardware to the market, since the preference would be to use something like the E-mu8000 chip for supporting music. Although adding support for these features generally moves quite slow, and most people would just end up buying a prepackaged system with some very basic hardware anyway. That's one of the things Creative failed to do, push developers to use their hardware to the extreme, but they didn't do it. Or at least it never happened if they did push.