Cirrus Logic announced two new chips, the CS4622 and CS4624. It's calling these chips the "industry's most powerful DSP-based multimedia audio solutions." Both chips, built for PCI audio, will also support legacy PC games as well. The CS4622 has built-in support for Dolby Digital (AC-3) and a Sony/Philips Digital Interface (S/PDIF), so it will be able to communicate with other consumer devices.

　　Cirrus has positioned the chips as a motherboard-based solution currently with the same hardware pinout connection as its current low-cost sound chip, the CS4280. This will allow manufacturers to place one of the chips onto motherboards with little or no design changes. The 4280 is currently embedded into Intel's SE440BX motherboards in systems like NEC's Direction SPB 400, Micron's Millennia XI, and Dell's Dimension XPS R.

　　Both the CS4622/24 chips run with 300 and 255 MIPS as they off-load real-time audio processing away from the CPU.

　　Other features from the chip include acoustic echo cancellation for speakerphone capabilities, 64-voice wave-table synthesis, DirectSound3D support, and support for AC-3 support in DVD movies.

　　Although there haven't been announcements regarding add-in sound cards, it is clear that the sound market is ramping up as one of the big technologies besides 3D graphics acceleration. Acoustic cancellation hasn't really been needed in games as of yet, but the technology will allow for clearer-sounding voices when using voice recognition software. Though you may not see the benefits yet, imagine saying "full speed ahead" without ever having to hit your throttle. It may be coming sooner than you expect.