First, the opening discussion with Jen-Hsun, CEO of NVIDIA, brought about some interesting news about SoundStorm audio. Without any of the usual pestering from the media in the room, he specifically mentioned that there was “still a lot of room for innovation” in audio technologies, “trust me.” He also stated point blank that they had continued development of SoundStorm audio and that rebuilding it was “going to be awesome.” He also vaguely hinted that we were “going to be surprised at how it shows up.”
Coupling this with the brief side note he made about the original NV1 chip having sound on the chip as well as video and 3D, I am leaning towards perhaps seeing a new GPU from NVIDIA in the future that will feature both audio and video on the GPU (though perhaps this name will change too?). This is all speculation at this point, but it sounds very intriguing, and should to the enthusiasts as well that have been itching to get more from NVIDIA’s sound technology recently.
Also, in case you haven’t seen it, NVIDIA announced today that they are working with Sony on the PS3 console system. There is also a chance that we will see this new audio technology used on the PS3 system as well.
So, we have a couple of theories, but I think it will be some time before we have any real answers on NVIDIA’s sound technology. But at least we know its really coming back.
Scott over at Tech Report has some thoughts on this as well:
Based on all of that, it doesn’t sound to me like the next SoundStorm is likely to find its way into a future nForce chipset. Instead, some future GeForce seems like a more likely place for SoundStorm to appear, as strange as that sounds. Of course, it’s all speculation at this point, but in one form or another, SoundStorm will someday return.