As with all things new and technically advanced, most of us hold onto our old out-of-date devices until the new-fangled widgets become more affordable. Unfortunately, by the time the device we want becomes cheap enough to consider, something new and infinitely cooler has already come along to make us look like dorks. If you are still holding on to your old Walkman or Discman until the price of MP3 players comes down, Cirrus Logic may have good news for you. Today, the company told the world about a new processor for portable Internet audio players, called the Maverick EP7409, which they figure will bring the price of flash-based players below $100 retail while doubling the length of time they can run on a set of batteries. The new Maverick will give 64 MB players support for MP3, WMA and ACC, and will reduce the number of parts required to build a player, theoretically reducing retail prices. For example, Cirrus says that if a current 64MB Internet audio player cost $130 to make, the bill of materials for the same device using the EP7409 would be around $69. (Along with the EP7409, part of the cost savings can be attributed to a reduction in the price of flash memory.) The new Maverick processor includes Cirrus Logic's TrueDigital Class D headphone amplifier, an ARM7 CPU and 24-bit audio DSP, MaverickKey security technology, 104K Bytes of SRAM, and 60K Bytes of ROM. The EP7409 will be sampling in Q3 and is expected to go into production in Q4. It will be priced at $15.85 for a 128-pin QFP or $16.35 for a 12mm 144-pin BGA in quantities of 10,000. All we need now is a guarantee that the device manufacturers will pass the savings along to us.