[PD] six sound outputs with sound blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1

[Charles Henry]

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:
> Le 2012-03-05 à 15:03:00, Charles Henry a écrit :
>
>
>> Sorry--I have no good news for you... and perhaps this knowledge only
>> adds to your injury.  The ASIC in your sound card has many, many times
>> the potential that it actually gets used for--up to 10,000 MIPS on a
>> quad-core DSP and up to 128 channels.
>
>
> It's just normal that increasingly more powerful technology becomes generic
> so that it can be used in many more products so that it can sell more so
> that it can pay for its own development and cut down on the production
> costs... eventually we put supercomputers inside chequebook-sized boxes and
> call them « telephones ».

I believe the 20k2 chip was rolled out in 2007.  By contrast, my 2009
HTC Hero had less power than that, but that's apples v. oranges.

The problem I see with this chip is just that:  it has so much
capability that it could be used for a wide range of products, but
then the designers program it and build salable hardware around just
one sort of "surround sound" product.  The free market has clearly
failed...

> The best you can do is write a distributed-computing virus that detects any
> such ASIC and hook it on some math problem such as trying to crack
> exterrestrial prime numbers and stuff... ;)

Yes, something USEFUL :)