Intel Developer Forum Day 3 - More from the Tech Showcase

One of the features of Powersville was this idea of dual independent audio, but we weren't able to give you a usage model that would make dual independent audio useful. We asked Intel to explain to us a situation where dual independent audio would be useful and they gave us a very simple and very believable scenario; imagine a media center PC that you're using to play a game on, and all of the sudden your brother, roommate or daughter walks into the room and wants to watch an episode of MacGyver they recorded.

Because Powersville supports dual displays, you can play the recorded video stream on a secondary display, whether it be a TV or another monitor, but what about the audio? You don't want the audio from the media center application coming through your speakers and interrupting your game, you want it coming from another set of speakers, preferably far away from you. Dual independent audio comes into play here and allows you to send the audio from the media center application to one output, while your game (or MP3, or whatever else you happen to be listening to) continues to play through a separate set of speakers.

Implementing dual independent audio is simple; all you need is a codec capable of supporting it and twice the number of jacks on the back of the system, ideally we'd only be dealing with SPDIF out so there would only be one other output jack to include.