Broadcom has come out with a super powerful SoC designed to offer more power than the Intel CE chips, and act as the basis of a whole home DVR, and could potentially be used to fire up OTT services. The chip comes with MoCA and other support technologies, like DLNA, in-built.
When Broadcom first announced it would invade MoCA and then announced its first chip to spearhead that invasion, we all thought that the leading MoCA chip maker, Entropic, could be swept aside. But since that first device was really designed to power slightly dumb and cheaper set tops, which in turn might be connected to this type of central device using MoCA, it was a little before its time in terms of getting customer wins.
By IBC this September it still had no customer wins to announce with, Entropic and rivals suggesting that it was tougher to do than Broadcom had first thought.
But by bundling the MoCA capability into a set top chip, it was only a matter of time before Broadcom began to get major customer wins and started to eat away at the economics which have driven Entropic, and which have also attracted other major rivals to the ‘no new wires’ video connectivity market place.
Now Broadcom has come out with a major new set top and media gateway chip at the top of its range, which is sure to pick up market share, and on this chip the MoCA capability is yet again bundled, but it is also aimed at the power levels of the Intel CE chips. Broadcom says that the BCM7422 has more than twice the processing horsepower of previous generations of set top SoCs, and it will to deliver full HD resolution 3DTV.
The chip has a 1.3-Gigahertz MIPs designed core processor, H.264 hardware accelerators to facilitate 1080p HD video and 3DTV. It also features 1 Gigapixel per second 3D graphics processing unit for advanced 3D graphics acceleration, plus MoCA, plus DLNA support. It is a set top makers wet dream by the sounds of it.
The idea is to deliver video content to multiple devices, and this looks like the heart of Broadcom’s video chip strategy, up there with the type of processing power that Intel CE4100 and 4200 bring to the party, but also with all the connectivity required to create top end multi-room DVRs, all built-in.
The new chip supports both types of 3D schemes, Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and Multiview Video Coding (MVC). MVC is the spec used in 3D Blu-ray Disc players, and uses two separate full HD streams. SVC has instead a second enhancement stream for the other-eye image, which uses 40% less bandwidth for 3D.
The chip will support up to eight external MPEG tuners, and it says it comes with the ability to terminate encrypted programming, so by that we assume that it has DTCP-IP decryption which is part of the DLNA standard to protect streams to other rooms in a multi-room DVR. It can also encapsulate broadcast video into IP, so it can tune stuff from cable or the airways and drop it into an IP connection. It can deliver multiple video streams to IP set-tops or other devices around the home.
Going back to the MoCA announcement it made a year or so ago and the chip it launched at last year’s CES, and they were always going to need a chip like this in the middle to drive the overall multi-room architecture, so it’s not too surprising that Broadcom has had little in the way of public backing for that chip.
Broadcom says that samples of its new DVR chip have already gone out to unidentified customers and it anticipates products using the 7422 SoC in mid-2011 and commercial deployments before the end of 2011. Broadcom already supplies chips to Motorola, Pace and Technicolor so we might expect this chip to emerge in any of those product lines.
Perhaps the delay on this chip was bringing it to the 40 nanometer CMOS process which constitutes Broadcom’s new generation chip standard, up from 65 nanometer n previous generations, which packs in more than twice the number of transistors, for about the same unit cost. The company claims that the BCM7422 will deliver 6000 DMIPS (Dhrystone MIPS a universal power measure for processors) and this is achieved by an onboard applications processor which offers 3000 DMIPS supported by its own OpenGL GPU. This distributed processing architecture packs an additional 3000 DMIPS into the performance making 6000 DMIPs in total.
Both the current generation of Intel CE chips, the 4100 and 4200, using slightly different processing architectures, are built in 45 nanometers and drive just 3000 DMIPS through the bonnet. If that’s a genuine realizable performance difference, then this is the chip that challenges Google TV and all the European OTT set tops that have benefitted from Intel’s incursion into set tops.
And if MoCA is NOT the connectivity option of choice (for instance if an operator wants HPNA or G.hn) then there is a version of the Broadcom chip which omits the MoCA chip, and costs 10% to 15% less.
The BCM7422 also features a customized (430MHz) VLIW (very long instructional word) DSP used mainly for audio processing, but which is also available to off-load Video Codec work to from the main CPU.
The chip comes with support for CableCard, Conax, DTCP-IP, Intertrust, Irdeto, Latens, Microsoft Playready, Nagra, NDS, and Verimatrix conditional access and DRM systems, says Broadcom.
Back in November Broadcom pounced on Gigle to break into HomePlug AV and G.hn, and so it could be just months away from bundling these technologies into its next generation set top chips as well.