A Processor Especially For Television

Television is now at an inflection point. For a new set of processors that are designed especially for the television are on the anvil, promising to revolutionize our outlook towards the idiot box.

Santa Clara, California-headquartered Intel Corporation has announced the launch of a new System-on-Chip (SoC) called Atom CE4100 which will bring Internet content to digital TVs, DVD players and advanced set-top boxes.

The CE4100 processor is a 45nm-manufactured SoC that is exclusively designed to support internet and broadcast applications. Clocking a speed of up to 1.2 Ghz, the chip supports hardware decode of up to two 1080p video streams and advanced 3-D graphics and audio standards, besides decode for MPEG4 video for DivX Home Theater 3.0 certification, an integrated NAND flash controller, support for both DDR2 and DDR3 memory and 512K L2 cache.

Integrated within the SoC is a display module, graphics module, video display controller, transport processor, a dedicated security processor and general I/O including SATA-300 and USB 2.0.

The SoC comes with a software framework called Widget Channel for the development of Internet applications, or TV Widgets.

Read more about how Intel is converting the television into yet another internet portal, here.