One addition to Gilad's explanation:
Under the Linmodem site you can find, listed as WinModem, the IBM MWave series of
cards. I happen to know this card (my company used to beta-test this card - before
your time Gilad). This card has all the processing power on card to do all its
tasks (that is - Modem, soundcard and, in some versions, TV digitizer). The only
thing lacking is a ROM with the firmware to do so.
When the computer is loaded, the driver identifies the card, and pushes the
instructions to the on-board DSP to be whatever you want. I have seen an MWave
card that was bought as a non-PnP 28800 modem, and with driver only updates ended
being a PnP 33600 modem. The CPU did not do all the hard work in this case.
I will mention one other thing here. The MWave series were pretty unique, and were
discontinued long before WinModem ever came out. It is highly likely that Gilad's
explanation regarding CPU usage is correct for all WinModems except the MWave
series.
You may ask yourself, at this stage, why did IBM discontinue the line? The reason
has to do with the great internal organization IBM has. The single MWave DSP chip
was shipped on at least three different boards with incompatible drivers. I know
of at least two more beta products that never reached the market. All were
incompatible driver-wise.
The rest was pretty expected. The drivers never reached sufficient quality (though
some did - eventually), and the product died.
Shachar
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