"Quartet" DSP (Digital Signal Processor)

We realized that in order to provide flexible yet potent audio processing we would need to design a very powerful DSP into the X-Fi processor. This all-new patent pending DSP architecture has 4 hardware threads, which why it is named the "Quartet" DSP. The Quartet architecture is also SIMD, (Single Instruction Multiple Data). We included two SIMD execution data-paths, which doubles the X-Fi throughput and allows us to efficiently support stereo and complex data types.

The instruction set supports both fixed-point and floating data types and is designed to efficiently implement both time domain and frequency domain signal processing. Because frequency domain processing is perceptually meaningful, the Quartet DSP can support a whole new class of interesting effects and applications.

The Quartet can perform 1,200 MIPs or 1,200 MFLOPs (not counting any address calculations or data moving). Because of the Quartet's specialized architecture it can sustain a throughput much closer to it's peak performance than a more general purpose processor could. "Quartet" can use the result of one instruction as an input operand to the very next instruction, with no pipeline stalls or intervening data moves.