Having owned almost all of Creative’s soundcards since the SoundBlaster 16, I have had the chance to experience many of those incremental jumps in the technology used, be it on the hardware or software side (e.g. EAX), the X-Fi offers several significant architectural changes such as the Ring Architecture, S-SRC, Quartet DSP, as well as 24-bit Crystalizer, and CMMS-3D. Putting marketing aside for a second though, the transistor count in the new X-Fi audio processor has been raised to an impressive 50 million (compare that to the 5 million in the Audigy 2), as well as the speed of the chip has been doubled to 400 MHz..



Link: Tech Spot