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• CES 2007: Highly integrated DTV chips expected to debut

  Pre CES 2007 coverage - Las Vegas (NV) - iSuppli expects DTV chip vendors to announce a variety of highly integrated chipsets at CES 2007 in an effort to gain a foothold in the ever- increasing DTV market. In the past few years, the Digital Television (DTV) market has expanded at a breakneck pace, growing to more than 100 million units in 2007, up from 70 million units in 2006, iSuppli forecasts. Not surprisingly, this growth has attracted a large number of chip companies that are offering up differing chipsets in order to enable a number of different DTV applications. At the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), DTV promises to be one of the staples of the show with current and future applications on display for the world to see. However, CES is also a stage for semiconductor vendors to showcase their innovations as a precursor to consumer electronics released at a later date. Integrate this The fastest-growing DTV segment is the integrated flat panel variety - televisions that include a digital receiver built into the TV. The most important aspects of this market are video quality for front-of-screen performance and system Bill of Materials (BOM) costs. The latter can be achieved by moving to more advanced process technology where additional functionality can be integrated into the same piece of silicon. Moving from 90 nanometer and above process technologies to 65 nanometer will allow chip designers the ability to integrate more functionality onto a single piece of silicon thus reducing the overall system costs by reducing the semiconductor content in these consumer electronics. Broadcom has recently released a chip that does exactly this, integrating fully High Definition 1080p support along with motion adaptive de-lacing, dual video decoders, dual HDMI receivers, six 10-bit ADCs for PC and HD inputs, dual channel LVDS transmitters and much more. As said before, expect to see more companies announce similar integrated chips at CES. Fragmented market There is no clear market leader in the DTV chip market with the largest market share only at 15%. In 2005, that position was occupied by NXP Semiconductors. With all of the major players vying for dominance in a variety of different DTV markets and with at least five companies that survive in a given market, chip vendors are trying everything they can in order to achieve the best price/performance ratio while enabling as much functionality as possible. Moving to a lower process technology allows companies the ability to increase the volume of chips rapidly softening the drain of price declines that are sweeping across the DTV market. Government mandates Another factor driving an increased presence of DTV offerings at CES is the government mandates beginning to take effect this year. After March, all televisions sold in the U.S. must have a digital tuner built-in. A certain number of Integrated DTVs (iDTVs) at higher sizes had been required to include a digital tuner but after March every television at every size will be required to have a digital tuner inside. Shyam Nagrani is the principal analyst for display electronics at iSuppli. You can contact him at snagrani@isuppli.com

• CES 2007: New HD media player from Netgear

  Netgear has announced its Digital Entertainer HD (EVA8000), a UPnP AV / DLNA networked media player supporting up to 1080p video via its HDMI 1.1 port. The EVA8000 can display still, music and video files streamed from UPnP AV sources without the need to run server software on a PC. However, running included software on a Windows PC enables the EVA8000 to play iTunes content, view YouTube videos and access a Windows desktop across a network. Read the complete story here. (SmallnetBuilder)

• Before running video quality tests, the user should make sure that "pulldown detection" is enabled in the Radeon’s Catalyst drivers, and that "inverse telecine" is enabled in the GeForce drivers. The newest versions of the drivers seem to enable these options by default. In the past, this wasn’t the case. For reference, we’ll compare the integrated motherboard solutions to the low-end discrete cards offered by their respective manufacturers, the GeForce 8400 and Radeon 2400 PRO. We didn’t have a Radeon 3450 on hand, but performance should be very close to that of the 2400 PRO as the 3450 is a die shrink of the 2400 with a slightly increased core clock speed. We’ve used Silicon Optix’s HQV HD-DVD benchmark in our last Avivo HD vs. PureVideo HD comparison. Last time, in all of those tests, the discrete GeForce 8400 GS and Radeon 2400 PRO scored a total of zero points in the HQV benchmark. We anticipate that the integrated graphics on the motherboards we’re testing will show similar results, but who knows? Maybe AMD or Nvidia have a trick or two up their respective sleeves. We chose to run the tests only on the Windows Vista operating system this time around, as XP is being phased out. We should note that in our past reviews, the GeForce drivers would not enable any image quality enhancements whatsoever under XP, so if that’s your operating system, a Radeon solution might be a better choice for you. HD Noise Reduction Test: Out Of 25 Points This test shows scenes that are plagued with noise artifacts. Good noise reduction erases most of these artifacts and makes it appear more natural and much less grainy. The trick is to make the noise reduction work without losing detail. HD NOISE REDUCTION TEST Graphics Processor Score Integrated Radeon HD 3200 0 Integrated GeForce 8200 0 Radeon 2400 PRO 0 GeForce 8400 GS 0 This first test is telling of what we can expect as far as image quality enhancements from integrated solutions go: in short, not much. Even the low-end discrete cards don’t have the power to provide any real image-quality enhancements and it takes everything they’ve got just to play HD content. It’s not included on the chart, but we will note that more powerful cards like the Radeon 2600/3650/4650 series and GeForce 8600/9500 series will offer powerful video quality enhancements and perform a lot better in the HD noise reduction test. For a true HTPC enthusiast, these cards are probably a better choice and it’s worth spending the extra money. More on that later, though. Let’s look at the next image-quality benchmark: the HD Video Resolution Loss test. HD Video Resolution Loss Test: Out Of 20 Points This test simply shows a pattern of lines and color bars. If the DVD player can show the smallest lines without flickering, it is successfully de-interlacing the image. VIDEO RESOLUTION LOSS TEST Graphics Processor Score Integrated Radeon HD 3200 0 Integrated GeForce 8200 0 Radeon 2400 PRO 0 GeForce 8400 GS 20 One again, the integrated solutions completely fall on their face. Out of the discrete cards, the GeForce 8400 GS manages to provide some image-quality enhancements, but it should be noted that the HQV Blu-ray disk seemed to stutter playback on that card. HD Video Reconstruction (Jaggies) Test: Out Of 20 Points This test simply shows a few rotating lines in a circle. As the angle changes, interlacing makes the lines appear to become stepped. Successful de-interlacing will remove this stepping. HD VIDEO RECONSTRUCTION TEST Graphics Processor Score Integrated Radeon HD 3200 0 Integrated GeForce 8200 0 Radeon 2400 PRO 0 GeForce 8400 GS 0 Once again, all contenders are unsuccessful at providing anything other than barebones Blu-ray playback; no image quality enhancements are present.