Thanks I was unaware of modern CPUs and SOCs have gotten powerful enough to replace DSPs for some applications. However don't some professional level sound cards have DSPs?
I think that's more because its required for consistency to their past high end products, or is due to some vintage aspect (which has become a big thing in the audio world, after companies saw people rebuilding their old gear instead of buying newer). I might be wrong though.
But Creative has dropped their DSPs (they use just like a 4 core SIMD solution to run their software stack; I'm not sure that they've fully ported all the capability of their older stuff though - but its stuff that they can't easily work with modern games so there's not a lot of reason to). I believe AMD does something similar (has a SIMD block onboard, maybe included in the video processing block?) that they used for TrueAudio (which hasn't really taken off on PC even though I believe its still there and they even touted it for some audio stuff in like the past couple of years), but that has been used on consoles (and I believe was maybe the impetus behind them developing it). It might've only been Sony (and not sure its used for all audio processing even then now) as I believe Microsoft put their own solution in it (which let them add newer audio format support like Dolby Atmos).
Chord actually has now even developed an FPGA DAC (as in they use the FPGA instead of a standard DAC chip). I'm not sure what process tech most DACs were made on but I noticed the Sabre DAC chips used on some newer Creative product looked tiny, like 1/4 or smaller of the size of the typical DAC chips I'm used to seeing. I don't know if that factored into Chord's decision though, I think its more just simply it lets them add features and possibly fix issues that otherwise might have needed reworking the schematic and changing chips. And I think it lets them do more UI type stuff (they have some weird colored buttons that change depending on what you're playing back).
Which there's been a movement for back to R2R/ladder DACs, which makes sense if you know audiophiles and their weird desire for senseless complexity so they can pretend its superior just because it gives
Korg has some DSD DACs on PC and converts PCM audio to DSD using software (which I believe some DAC chips have the capability to convert one to the other). iFi supposedly somehow programmed the DAC chip of some lower level Burr-Brown chip to do DSD processing in their iDSD (there was a small fuss made when some sound engineer that works in DSD audio was skeptical as the DAC chip they used, according to the spec sheet didn't have the capability they advertised, but they assured him it would actually work and he tested and found it worked).
The Realtek chips that are standard on PC these days (ALC 1220 I think is the common high end one these days) do audio processing and DAC, but you can use it for just one (there's some boards that do that and pair it with an ESS Sabre DAC). And many mobile SoCs have their own built in (but its been awhile since I've seen much analysis of that, I don't recall if people took apart the USB-C headphone adapters to see if they had DACs built in or if they were just doing analog out, which I believe Apple does on the lightning headphone adapters for iPhone - it can do digital out to a DAC as well but I think theirs just does audio out - which led many people to wonder why Apple did that with some guy going so far as to physically hack in a 3.5mm jack onto his iPhone).
Not entirely sure what my point is with posting all of that other than remarking about odd audio stuff these days.