Watch this space
It was all about TV today at IDF, as Eric "I love TV" Kim, senior Intel veep and general manager of the company's Digital Home Group gave a keynote about Intel's plans to sharpen the "cutting edge of television" a little more, even adding Atom processors into the mix.
Starting out by demoing a TV media centre with Star Trek star LeVar Burton (Geordie la Forge), Kim went on quip that IDF was the place "techies and trekkies gather" (*groan*) before announcing that Intel's new Atom CPU, previously dubbed Sodaville, was being launched as the Atom CE4100 media processor. This will actually be the first time Intel is using its revenue cannibalizing chip for anything other than PCs, and the first 45nm-manufactured consumer electronics SoC based on Intel architecture; so perhaps this is a sign of more things to come.
The CE4100 can deliver speeds of up to 1.2GHz and has apparently been especially designed for media devices like set-tops, Blu-Ray players and digital TVs, purportedly supporting dual 1080p streams, high-end audio and real-time 1080p AV capture. It is, of course, backward compatible with the CE 3100 and also boasts "Precision View Technology," a display processing engine to support high-definition picture quality.
Added to the mix are features like hardware decode for MPEG4 video, already ready for DivX 3.0 certification, an integrated NAND flash controller, support for both DDR2 and DDR3 memory and 512K L2 cache. Intel says its new CE SoC contains a display processor, graphics processor (featuring Imagination Technologies' Power VR SGX 353 core), video display controller, transport processor, a dedicated security processor and general I/O including SATA-300 and USB 2.0.
