ALive! - features - Dave Rossum

EMU10K1 - The DSP From Hell...

Creative has stressed repeatedly that the EMU10K1 is a very flexible chip with lots of untapped potential. This is very vague to some. Can you give us an insight to the "untapped potential" of the chip besides the fact that it is easily re-programmable? At its present state, how much "potential" has been realized?

Since my primary expertise is in hardware, I’m often amazed at the clever things the software guys can pull out of a flexible design. So to some extent, I don’t think it’s possible to say how much more "potential" there is in a chip like to EMU10K1. Certainly, the reprogramability of the chip is a big factor; anytime you can change the personality of the chip, you can do lots of neat things you never thought of. Another factor is the fact that there are about a dozen features that we hardware designers threw in that the software guys haven’t turned on yet. Of course, I can’t say what they are and tip off the competition. Honestly speaking, however, I’d estimate that the current level of Live!Ware and EAX taps about 50% of the 10K1’s power.

The EMU10K1 is rated as a 1000MIPS DSP chip. With so much processing power, it shouldn't have any problem decoding Dolby Digital on the card. Will we see this feature implemented in the near future or we won’t because sales of Desktop Theatre 5.1 might be affected?

Despite the touted flexibility of the EMU10K1 and its incredible MIPS rating, hardware acceleration of AC-3 isn’t one of the things we can do. The reason is that we designed the 10K1 as a "time domain" processor, while Dolby Digital is largely implemented in the frequency domain. So the instruction set is not conducive to this kind of operation.

How well do you think the EMU10K1 holds up compared to the Vortex2?

Creative really doesn’t feel the two are comparable, as they are based off two very different design philosophies: upgradable, instruction based audio DSP (EMU10K1) and fixed-function, hard-coded audio ASIC (Vortex2). Creative has spent the last 10 years developing the latter, and looking at the future, we decided it wouldn’t be the right way to go. With the 10K1 you get the same audio quality as the fixed function ASIC, but with the flexibility and upgradability that comes with being a DSP or processor. When new things come down the pike (like EAX, WDM, DLS, etc.) we can quickly add them in hardware without requiring the end user to purchase a new card. Thus, the 10K1 gives the best of both worlds.

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