The Intel^® HD Audio controller is the standard audio host controller widely adopted in the PC platform, with industrial standard Intel^® HD Audio driver software available for Microsoft Windows* and many other Linux* based OS. Intel^® HD Audio controller features are listed as follows:

• Supports data transfers, descriptor fetches, DMA position writes using VC0 or VC1.
• Independent Bus Master logic for 16 general purpose DMA streams: Seven input and Nine output.
• Supports variable length stream slots.
• Supports up to:
  • 16 streams
    • Seven input

      — Two system streams (dedicated)

      — Two system / two offload streams (shared)

      — Two offload streams (dedicated)

      — One feedback stream

  • Nine output
    • Seven system streams
    • Two offload streams
  • 32 bits/sample
  • 192 KHz sample rate
• Supports memory-based command/response transport.
• Three 8-channel universal DMA interfaces for transferring data between memory buffers and peripherals and between memories
• Supports optional Immediate Command/Response mechanism.
• Supports output and input stream synchronization.
• Supports global time synchronization.
• Supports MSI interrupt delivery.
• Support for ACPI D3 and D0 Device States.
• Supports Function Level Reset (FLR)
• Support Converged Platform Power Management (CPPM).
• Support 1 ms of buffering with all DMA running with maximum bandwidth.
• Support 10 ms of buffering with one output DMA and one input DMA running at two channels, 96 KHz, 16 bit audio.

The Input / Output Stream DMA can be individually put into coupled mode where the host and link portion of the DMA will be directed to the associated FIFO and flow-controlled automatically by HW; or put into de-coupled mode where the host and link portion of the DMA will be directed to the unique DSP buffers setup by DSP FW for inserting audio processing pipe stages.