Broadcom reckons that its new video chips for PCs allows for the manufacture of PCs, which can play HD video, to be built for under a $1,000 retail price.
Broadom made this statement at the Computex 2007 show in Taiwan this week announcing a set of chips that can offload most of the processing work from the PC CPU to run either a Blu-ray or HD DVD drive on the PC, under Microsoft Windows Vista.
The new Broadcom chips come on PCI Express cards, PCI Express mini-cards or ExpressCards, or as a chipset for PC motherboards.
HD video playback can require intensive CPU processing, and additional components such as discrete graphics processors, with video hardware acceleration, and that has driven up PCs costs, says Broadcom to around $2,000 to $3,500, when decent HD playback is added.
Broadcom cited US researcher In-Stat saying that the market for HD DVD and Blu-ray enabled PCs will grow to 15 million by the end of next year.
Broadcom rolled out comments from Intel and video software suppliers CyberLink with its PowerDVD systems, InterVideo with its WinDVD 8 system to support the launch, but market leader Sonic Solutions was noticeably absent from this list.
Broadcom’s new video technology is embedded in its BCM70010 and the BCM70012 product range and priced at under $40 per chip in high volumes.
Broadcom also said this week that it has a new reference design for developing portable multimedia devices which it co-developed with Micro-Star International (MSI), a Taiwanese ODM.
The platform integrates Broadcom’s VideoCore applications processor built around ARM 11 with Bluetooth an FM tuner radio, Wi-Fi and power management into a single, small form factor to give fast to market advantage for portable multimedia players, which to us sounds just right for non-handset mobile TV platforms. The platform is available now.