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Title:

X-Fi : an aircraft carrier for sound

Description:

Creative has announced the release from this autumn of products based on a new DSP named X-Fi. As far as we know, its advantage is to validate the architecture principle already used with the Audigy 2 and bring a new terminology to the computer audio world. The X-Fi is beyond all questions the most impressive chip so far. It integrates no less than 51,100,100 transistors! Compared to the 4,600,100 transistors of the Audigy one must suppose that our ears won’t believe their tympanum when they will hear to the first sound of future Creative Labs sound cards.

According to the information available, 70.7% of the X-Fi calculation power is dedicated to Sample Rate Converter operations. It compensates the downside of Creative Labs chips observed first with the Emu10k1 which worked natively in 48 kHz whereas most of the computer audio sources are currently sampled in 44.1 kHz. With the Audigy 2 and 2 ZS this operation was made by a Cirrus Logic CS8420 chip, but with the X-FI it is made directly by the DSP. Also it capable of reading directly sources in 24/96 or in 24/1192 without being bypassed. It will however still be impossible to apply the effect engine without the 48 kHz frequency. To compensate this second downside of the Audigy 2, X-Fi is capable of applying sound effect on a 24/96 or 24/192 soundtrack with the ‘Band Splitting’ function. This function divides the 96 kHz frequency by two and the 192 kHz by four and then recombines them at the output.

The 50 millions of transistors increase the X-Fi power calculation to 10 340 MIPS instead of 424 MIPS for the Audigy 2. From now on, Creative do not only communicate on the product noise signal report but also on the MIPS. You can’t however talk about calculations without talking about architecture. So far the terminology used to talk about computer audio was more or less the same that in the audio world. Namely, the support of several sampling rates (44.1, 48, 96 or 196 kHz) and resolutions (16 or 24 bits), the more or less good support of Home Cinema (Dolby Digital, DTS) or game (DS3D, EAX) norms and the capacity to apply effects in real time via a DPS or with a software engine. The X-FI is one step further. The architecture used is named « Ring Architecture » and is divided in several « engines » (who said that the 3D terminology was contagious?). The first engine, the SRC is mentioned above. The second one, the Tank Engine, is dedicated to effect application such as the chorus, reverb, and reflections. The third one, the mixer engine, mixes several sources in input or output up to 4096 internal channels simultaneously. Then comes the Filter Engine which deals with environment and positioning effects. In other words, now the DSP doesn’t process its function via multitask calculation units, but posses specialised calculation units.

Another innovation of the le X-Fi is the come back of embedded memory on sound cards. According to the graphic card positioning in the range it will feature from 2 to 64MB of memory to stock and process data faster. Finally we have noticed that the chip is said to be PCI and not PCI Express.

We will write another paper as soon as we will have more information on the X-Fi. And we will point out especially the real improvements for the user behind this nice but obscure jargon. As the current tendency is the audio integration to the main system and the almost 100% software management expected with Longhorn, we may ask ourselves what is the future of Creative Labs’ new orientation. The Singaporean manufacturer is however an historical pioneer of computer sound innovation, se we are eager to see what will happen next.

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