Digital Home Thoughts: Creative's New X-Fi Audio Processor Reviewed

"The X-Fi's processing power is divided between five internal units: the sample rate converter, digital signal processor, and mixer, filter, and tank engines. Much of the X-Fi's muscle ripples through a sample rate converter (SRC) that Creative claims pushes over 7000 MIPS. The SRC is actually made up of 256 individual sample rate converters, all of which tackle sampling rate conversions in the same manner. First, the sampling rate of an incoming audio stream is doubled. Next, a poly phase Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter is used to produce a sampling rate four times greater than the desired output sampling rate. Finally, the sampling rate is reduced by a factor of four for output. According to Creative, this process is nearly transparent, and any loss in quality during sample rate conversions is miniscule. "



I love reviews like this one. I am a big follower of sites like HardOCP and Ars Technica where they do detailed reviews of hardware, explain the entire architecture of the chip that CS folks like me love, and finally benchmark this hardware. So how did it rate? The review highly recommends the X-Fi XtremeMusic for its strong performance in the gaming and listening tests, its low CPU utilization, and the X-Fi architecture's considerable potential.