Analog Devices - SoundMax & New Cooling Technology
SoundMax is an AC'97 compliant sound solution for core logic chipsets with integrated audio controllers. In simple terms, it is integrated audio that is currently found in many of Intel's motherboards. Although many don't like integrated audio, Analog Devices has developed a low CPU impact solution that sounds better than many add-in solutions, and the cost, of course, is incorporated into the motherboard.
A system from Micron that features the SoundMax technology and is currently shipping.
What is perhaps more exciting is the new stereo microphone technology, for which Analog Devices has teamed up with Andrea Electronics. The Andrea Superbeam microphone technology frees you from being tethered to a headset style microphone, and with impressive results. Expect to hear more about this new technology soon, as it is something from which many people and applications can benefit.
The thermal solutions group at Analog Devices also showed us some very new fan control technology that will be able to start and stop the cooling fans in a system, based on the data being monitored from the Pentium 4 CPU. With this temperature monitoring technology, it is possible to have an almost silent PC. The ambient room noise was louder than the PC itself. It aims to revolutionize the way cooling is handled on the PC. More details are to come soon, but from what we saw, the results and control of the technology were impressive, to say the least.
