John Connolly - High Speed Internet and Digital Video.
I agree with your observation that the end applications are what drive the chip market. And that digital video will be one of the drivers in the current decade.
First - a point of reference. Right now the Internet has streaming video. I'm watching Bloomberg on my PC even as I type this. Not the best resolution or audio and the frame rate is a bit low but perfectly acceptable for informational content.
*** So I am going to assume that your speculation is aimed more at TV/movie quality video. The reason why I point this out is because this quality of video, with MPEG2 compression, runs at 4 Mbps for realtime viewing. Compare that to my DSL rate of 1 Mbps. A major upgrade will be needed and not just at the delivery. I suspect that the whole internet framework will have to be beefed up. Major undertaking!
High Speed internet - (Courtesy of Silicon Valley Business Report last night). Right now cable, telecom, satellite, and wireless are all vying to be in this market when it happens. Unfortunately, they are all asking for government subsidies. Bush is reported to be preparing an high bandwidth initiative to be released in a few weeks.
*** Could be interesting but I doubt it. It will likely be a political football. Add to that the pain of upgrading the whole infrastructure and you're looking at 10 to 20 years.
NOW THE GOOD NEWS -
...Digital video is here already and it is gaining momentum. DVD players are selling well and most have VCD (video CD) capability. HDTV is also starting to gain some momentum as are add-ons such as TIVO/Replay TV (aka PVR - personal video recorder).
...Better yet is the PC-Home Theater convergence. There are several video capture/TV tuner cards for the PC that can turn it into a TV, DVR (digital vcr), and PVR. And there are now HDTV cards showing up for the PC. Throw in a DVD or CD burner and you can throw away the VCR altogether.
...More importantly, you need a beefy PC when working with digital video where 1 hour runs from 1 to 9 Gbytes. Just moving the file takes a couple minutes let alone editing, recompressing, or (ugh) noise filtering. (Right now I have a 1.4 GHz Athlon w/ 266MHz FSB, 512 MByte Dram, 100 GByte HD, 16X CD burner. Adequate but I wish I had more!)
...That should give you a taste of what is to come - for digital video. Be aware that there are many other areas where there will be chip demand growth - wireless connectivity (check out Palm's new version of the electronic leash!), and stuff that I can't yet imagine (but I bet somebody can!). |
