The FM801 from Forte Media Corporation is one of the newer breed of sound card ASICs. As opposed to many chips working together, the designers took a cue from ethernet IC manufacturers and designed a chip that required no extranious support (save a circuit board) to function - PCI interface, pre-amp and DMA interface on a single wafer.
I packs a satifying amount if features, for the early 21st century, into such a small package -- Dolby 5.1 decoding and output (via spider cable), PCI 2.2 bus master controller (with scatter gather function), digital mixer, sample rate conversion, music synthesis, AC'97 compatible codec interface and I2S and S/PDIF interfaces.