I have just completed sorting all the info I could gather on X-Fi
1) It is a completely redesigned Sound processing chip with about 400 MHz Aural clock speed, which is not like CPU clock or GPU clock, remember a GPU running at 400 MHz can do more calculation then a 400 MHz CPU due to it’s architecture, same goes here, in this case, it’s calculating Sound
2) It removes the bottleneck in quality of compressed music, like mp3, mp4 or wma, while compressing the RAW quality audio in any compressed format, there is a slight quality loss, this loss is minimized with better audio compression, in other words, if u rip a CD Audio file to mp3 there is more quality loss compared to if u rip it to mp4 or wma, here X-Fi works, U can either Super-Rip it as said by Creative, which will simply enhance the compression, & add to it X-FI features & make it a 24 bit WMA file, as of now, there is no news about other formats being supported or not. This is done by their 24 bit Crystallizer
3) Just like a GPU can use the embedded memory on the card for storing texture & graphical calculation & data, Creative is now using X-Ram technology, which is simply local memory on the soundcard like local memory on GPU, to store all the sound calculations, however due to the low size of audio calculation, do not expect to see an X-Fi sound card with anything more then 8 or 16 MB memory. Games will benefit form this but only to a very limited extent, as all the audio data is saved in sound card only. As of now, it will be available only in X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS & X-Fi Elite pro cards. EAX Advanced HD 5.0 is also being released with it. All the audio is completely hardware accelerated.
4) Just like the current Audigy series, the high end models, X-Fi will also come with a new Live Drive like module, also it is now also tailor made for Audio creation, looks like creative wants to take a page out of Yamaha & M-Audio success
Creative is touting their new Ring architecture, just like dual core CPU, this new SPU is multicore, having 4 Cores, working independently, supporting 128 voices, compare that to Audiogy 4 which supports 64 voices
