Software Defined Audio on Central Compute: A Teardown Driven Cost Model and an Implementation Pattern with QNX Sound

This session hosted by Jose Maria Marin, QNX Sound Solutions Director, addresses that gap directly through the findings of a detailed 16-week teardown conducted by Munro and Associates, which examined amplifier designs from five global OEMs. The teardown revealed a clear pattern across the industry. DSP-heavy architectures consistently drive-up material cost, increase component counts, and lock OEMs into vendor specific solutions that are costly to update or replace. By quantifying the real financial and engineering impact of these choices, the teardown highlights why audio is one of the most important candidates for centralization within the in‑cabin compute stack. The analysis shows that moving audio signal processing from the amplifier into the IVI SoC can generate significant savings, with reductions ranging from $21.91 to $98.49 per unit. In premium systems, this can translate into reductions of up to 62%, along with notable hardware efficiencies such as PCB area reductions of up to 44% and the removal of more than 600 components in high-end designs.