Wrt. to letting them being designed and produced by TSCM and similar, yes.
But if you wan to do production "from scratch" it's a complete different matter, even if the chip is "simple" you still need a proper chip production method, which is never simple.
There is a reason why we only have very few fabs today, even through there is a lot of demand for chips using "older" production methods (>28nm). It's often still not profitable to produce them even for companies which have all the necessary patents, know-how and even some older existing machinery. A thing the care industry was hit hard by.
I do hope they don't switch back to the Realtek codec in the future.
The Tempo do lack the ALC’s smart features but they couldn’t get the latter to work anyway...
I have no idea how expensive the Realtek chip is or anything else to put that in context, though.
(I probably am using some or all of the technical words above incorrectly, but I am going mostly from memory and hope to be corrected as I don’t know much about hardware design or manufacturing.)
Thanks. If those 2500 for $4.29 are "current" rate. ( Chip Shortage ) Then it should be cheaper than current Realtek. But in terms of normal pricing that is quite a bit more.
While I don’t own a Framework I welcome this change and find it quite interesting, partly because it seems like every laptop and PC maker these days are putting an ALC chip on their boards. You also don’t see computer companies announcing “we’re ditching chip X for chip Y” often and this is very informative transparency.
It feels like Realtek puts a lot of red tape around its chips. Most notably, it’s very hard to look up a datasheet for an ALC chip unless it’s a very popular part. Realtek also seem to only provide stock and support to their biggest customers like Dell and Gigabyte, because it sounds like Framework struggled to secure stock, probably from a one-off source, for their first batches and couldn’t get in touch with Realtek to implement the Smart DSP feature.
The Tempo chip on their other hand is much more open. The datasheet is right on the product page, and the chip has first-class Linux support. In the integrated sound card market where Realtek is to codec as Clorox is to bleach, I welcome attempts to diversify the market share.