[Astlinux-users] Bizarre idea...

[<ast...@el...>]

I had a bit of a brainfart recently after seeing some info on the
newer VIA nanoITX boards that should be coming out late summer.

I understand that there are codec offload engines available as
hardware. In the case of the VIA stuff I saw, their new monolithic
chipset has a number of decode capabilities, which can be expanded
with an external encoder ASIC chip.

Is there any value (or a market) for a dedicated VoIP codec offload
engine for Asterisk? Would this be best served by real hardware, or by
an FPGA? The bad idea I had was, get a PCI card with something like a
Xilinx Vertex4 FPGA, and load up all the codecs Asterisk should ever
need, video included. Since trying to do this has already crossed a
number of programming, royalty, and cost thresholds, go for some echo
cancelling as well. Bad idea, or just infeasible due to cost and
complexity?