SenjutsuSage
Newcomer
I thought someone from Microsoft said that the audio chip wasn't programmable by game devs & that it was mostly for Kinect?
Nope, that's not entirely the case and people have been misinterpreting those comments. The DSPs are not programmable by devs and appear, as you say, mostly reserved for Kinect processing and some other system functions, but the fixed function blocks, aka SHAPE, are something else entirely, and those six fixed function blocks that make up SHAPE are 100% available for programmers to do with as they please. It was designed with that purpose in mind because, according to bkilian, the folks that designed the audio block realized that they had some extra space to fit something else in there for free, and that's apparently how SHAPE came about.
The catch is just that, compared to what the full audio block on Xbox One is capable of, as in its full potential, the portion that's actually available to devs to program as they like, is a very small portion of that larger potential, but it was never suggested that the entire audio block belongs to Kinect. The Xbox One Audio Block is more than a single chip. It's 4 Tensilica DSP processors, and then it's the SHAPE block, which is made up of six fixed function units that are all available to developers.