ATI R700 Series Gain ALSA HDMI Audio

While the Radeon R700 series of graphics processors aren't yet available, it's getting closer to release, and yesterday the ALSA development tree picked up support for HDMI audio on the R700 series. This patch, which was submitted by one of AMD's engineers, adds support for the RV710, RV730, RV740, and RV770 GPUs. This support can be found in the hda-intel driver in the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). The Radeon R600 series was first to introduce an embedded audio processor for use when using the HDMI adapter (Using HDMI With ATI Linux Drivers). Support for the R600 series has already been in ALSA.

The Radeon R700 series is AMD's next-generation GPU series that will replace the R600 series and is due out later this year. Most interesting about the R700 series is that it will be composed of a small cluster of modular GPUs instead of a single large GPU die. It is also expected that these GPUs will be built upon a 45nm process and feature GDDR5 memory. The HDMI audio support for the RV710, RV730, RV740, and RV770 GPUs can be found in the ALSA development tree and a few months down the road in ALSA 1.0.17. The PCI ID patch submitted by Libin Yang can be found on the alsa-devel list.