BillyG, What does this really say? Can CUBE top this one from IBM?
IBM shows TV commitment
IBM Microelectronics has produced a chipset for the digital television
set-top boxes of the future, indicating the computer giant's commitment to
the television market across a wide range of equipment and technology
areas, writes Margot Suydam.
The company has combined its expertise in MPEG encoding and decoding
with a PowerPC chip to create a single chip set-top evaluation kit running
Open TV. At an Amsterdam hotel yesterday, IBM showed a prototype
chipset, equipped to demonstrate Internet web browsing on television, DVD
playback and hard disk recording.
"Today, we are showing a single chip prototype with which we're going to
production in early 1999, featuring our MPEG decoders and encoders,"
says IBM digital television marketing manager, Gordon Grove. He explains
that IBM has tapped its expertise in building increasingly sophisticated
chipsets to maximise capabilities in the current technology.
"The whole thing is designed for the best possible throughput," he says.
"Important to this whole solution is the memory architecture. The MPEG
chip and CPU are connected to two processor busses because we want
data flying though the MPEG decoder all the time. With the crossbar
switch, the decoder can still get to and back from the processor without
the MPEG memory being interrupted. It appears as a unified memory
architecture without the drawbacks." |
