VR-Zone has a good opportunity to talk to a bunch of X-Fi guys over at Creative Technology recently and we managed to find out a little more about their direction and upcoming plans. We learned that Creative will continue to focus on their X-Fi technology and is in fact very open to licensing of their technology. There is a shift from sales of complete solutions to chipset solutions. One fine example is the licensing of their X-Fi technology and sale of the X-Fi sound chips to Auzentech where they are going to release the Prelude 7.1 into the market soon. It is interesting to know that Creative might attempt to take on the audiophile market by making audiophile standard sound cards by themselves or perhaps through 3rd party makers. Lastly, we managed to find out a little more about the X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCI Express card that surfaced in Akibahara Japan recently. Creative revealed that the sound chip has a PCI to PCIe bridge internally but the downside is that the latency is high so they plan to have the native PCI Express X-Fi chips coming by end of 2007.
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