While at IBC this week it was easy to ask where Intel was, and whether or not it would continue to have a future in set top and home gateway chips, which had been most promisingly started with its two CE chips the 3100 and replacement 4100 over the past two years. Intel instead waited a day or so and fired its set top barrage from the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, kicking off with a new CE chip, and new chip family for embedded applications and set top deals signed with each of ADB, Samsung, Sagemcom and Technicolor to build set-top boxes based on its new SoC, the CE4200
The older 4100 had fairly sparse, if spectacular success. It was used by Amino in a hybrid Over The Top set top designed for a European tier one telco who is thought to be Telecom Italia, one or two other part players have included it in reference designs, such as Conceptronic of the Netherlands, and then suddenly it appeared in the Google TV. Yesterday is was suddenly switched into the Boxee set top as the service was prepared for launch. The Boxee had been reliant on an Nvidia Tegra 2 right up until the last moment, which features a Cortex A9 ARM instruction set.
This is very much part of the ARM versus Intel instruction set debate. Set tops do not need low power, at least not unless they are also portable, but they need the blazing speed usually associated with an Intel CPU.
The CE4100 was announced at this show last year as a 45 nanometer SoC chip. So far we have not seen it in any Blu-ray players and large brands have not backed it, for good reason. It will be substantially more expensive than the Broadcom, ST Micro and Sigma designs which have formed the basis of virtually every DVD chip and set top’ cable, satellite and IPTV ‘ for the past four years.
Although these are called Atoms, which implies they are part of the low power range of Netbook devices, the chip however has far more to it than that. It has a display processor, graphics processor, video display controller, transport processor and a dedicated security processor for DRM decryption support. We presume that the new chip has minor advances which make it more suitable for Blu-ray players and fit in better with the designs of these majors.
The old chip cycled at 1.2GHz and supported hardware decode of up to two 1080p video streams. It had a hardware decoder for DivX and an integrated NAND flash controller and the new chip has these also, and supports OpenGL 2.0, Adobe Flash and H.264. We understand these are unchanged on the new chip, so it’s tough to see exactly what’s changed.
Last time out it was companies like the BBC, CBS, Cisco and TransGaming alongside Accedo Broadband, CinemaNow and Netflix standing on stage, but none of them were going to take a million of these chips and put them in a box, with ADB, Samsung, Sagemcom and Technicolor ‘ every one of them major set top builders in the supporting line up, this promises to be the real deal.
The only new things that have been said about this chip is that it can support sync-and-go, has better power saving and supports 3D.
The Sync and go feature we assume is something that can power copying content from a set top, perhaps through the inclusion of a DLNA secure client. This might allow mobile devices to rapidly copy content or view content streams from set tops to netbooks
Interestingly at the International Broadcasting Conference in Amsterdam this week we saw the first such implementation of such a secure DLNA client from ADB, one of the set top companies which is supporting this announcement. It was able to decrypt a conditional access stream, re-encode it with DTCP/IP link protection and send it to an iPad software client which is certified as safe, and unable to save a copy. We assume that it will do exactly that same thing on a netbook or Intel powered tablet once they emerge.
The power savings were probably the real reason to have the CE4100 re-architected, in order to keep overall TV system power requirements down. The support for 3D, which implies double the throughput, because 3D needs two separate 1080p streams, one for each eye, was probably only a software change, because the older CE4100 could already manage two parallel decodes for HD, so we’re not sure if that’s much of a change really.
Technicolor put out its own announcement saying that it has entered a deep collaboration with Intel which will fuel plans to build a new generation of hybrid broadcast IP set-top boxes, which come with multi-screen, 3D, games and online video.
We can almost hear the conversations between Intel and the struggling Technicolor, with Intel tempting it with help in its rapidly retreating set top heartlands. The final step will be when a major US TV operator orders an Intel based device and Technicolor used to have major influence here, and may still carry some clout. For instance it suppliers many devices to DirecTV.
Technicolor said it had a chance to test early prototype silicon, provide technical recommendations to Intel, and prove new STB designs and it has 3D Multiview Coding and video transcoding demonstrations of the chipset capabilities and will deliver first devices in early 2011.
Samsung had announced a day earlier that its new Samsung App store was now available in 109 countries, and that’s both for its Bada mobile phones and for TV applications. Samsung was adding countries like Costa Rica, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Iceland, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, and Sudan, having already done all the major markets. If you drive TV Apps with an Intel processor across 109 countries that could make the consumer markets wide open to Intel.
But in a way we doubt that it will. It is likely that for the most part, and for device vendors which do not have Samsung’s reach, it is in fact Android which will drive both set tops and TV sets into the App age and we have seen that this can be either ARM based, and since the Summer, Intel based, since it has hosted Android in order to build Google TV.
That will leave Google in control and ARM versus Intel a sideshow that can only be to the detriment of Broadcom, ST Micro and Sigma,
As if to underline that, at the International Broadcasting Conference in Amsterdam this week ARM, Dolby and specialist Indian DSP programming outfit Ittiam, all agreed a deal to attack the home audio market. They have put a Dolby MS10 Multistream Decoder on an ARM Cortex-A Series of processors, including a Dolby Digital Plus decoder for next generation digital TVs and set tops.
Mostly this is aimed at audio for now ‘ but in set tops. Also at the IBC show was the odd glimpse of tiny ARM based set tops, for instance from Korean set top maker Kaon, which ran an early version of Android. There is a lot of work before that transition occurs, but right now it looks like Intel has no intention of giving up on the humble set top box against lower power ARM rivals.
Intel also launched it’s the Atom E600 SoC series of chips also known as ‘Tunnel Creek,’ for embedded markets, including in-car entertainment, Internet phones, and smart grid devices at its Developer Forum, along with its own Netbook AppUpSM center netbook app store for consumers, which kicked off with Adobe AIR applications and others from Accuweather, Barnes & Noble, Funkitron, Gibson Guitars, iWin, Kaplan, Konami and Lifetime.