Support Begins For Intel's New Haswell Audio

For months already Intel has been working on Haswell enablement under Linux. While the Intel Haswell CPUs are still a year out from shipping, the graphics code is already being tackled quite extensively. This morning we're now seeing the first signs of Intel Haswell audio support.

A few ALSA audio patches surfaced over the night from Intel's Wang Xingchao. The patches are for Haswell HDA audio support with the open-source HDA Linux kernel driver for audio.

What's a bit interesting is that this audio support is advertised for Haswell itself and not a motherboard chipset, like the Sandy Bridge audio support was for the Cougar Point chipsets and Ivy Bridge has the Panther Point chipsets. With Haswell are they moving the audio controller onto the CPU itself?

It's been talked about that Broadwell, which is the 2014 successor to Haswell, Intel will move to a multi-chip package design where the PCH will effectively be on the CPU. It looks like for Haswell some parts -- the audio at least -- might already move over to the CPU.

The PCI device ID for this Haswell HDA audio controller is 0x0c0c while the vendor ID is of course the same (0x8086). The HDMI ID for Haswell is 0x80862807.

The patches themselves aren't too interesting (they're rather trivial), but they begin here on the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture mailing list.