Soundcards where created for the same purpose, and now every mobo has a chip with the sound codecs on board and the cpu takes over the decoding. Its just a matter of calculation power.
If your cpu would be fast enough, it wouldn't matter if x86 is inefficent. The problem, right now is, they arn't and thats why specialised hardware is faster (and always will be faster)
Also, intel also is eager to bring x86 to the embeded market. So they arn't focusing only on the high performance market but also on a mass market (set top boxes, VDR etc.).







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