Along with the Grantsdale and Alderwood motherboards using the 925 and 915 chipsets, Intel has introduced a number of improvements which we have previously reported on and discussed. PCI Express is one improvement, and here is another - HD Audio.

There are some wonderful improvements in PC audio coming our way with this. There's a single, unified audio driver planned. Also, the solutions will support up to 15 simultaneous audio streams, supporting resolutions up to and including 192KHz/24-bit to enable two-channel playback for DVD-Audio and enough bandwidth for 96KHz/24-bit multichannel DVD-A. Oh, and its also possible for multiple codecs on a single motherboard to operate autonomously - allowing different numbers of streams to be routed through each codec at different sampling rates.

More here.