Philips today announced the PNX1700, a new member of the company's Nexperia family of media processors with high-definition (HD) capabilities. Combining media processing, network connectivity and display enhancement on a single chip, the PNX1700 is designed to deliver high picture quality of streaming movies, news, digital photos and TV programs, the company said. It doubles the performance of previous generations while maintaining both hardware and software compatibility, Philips claimed. Digital Connected Consumer devices equipped with the PNX1700 include IP set-top boxes, digital media adapters, personal video recorders, videophones and TVs.

The PNX1700 integrates a 500 MHz Trimedia CPU core. The chip supports decoding of HD video formats, including Windows Media Video, DivX, MPEG-4 and MPEG-2. According to Philips, the PNX1700 can simultaneously encode and decode full D1 resolution MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video, which would make it a solution for personal video recorder applications. The PNX1700 also includes new instructions to optimize encoding and decoding of H.264 video as well as support standard definition (SD) to HD up-conversion with advanced de-interlacing, Philips said. (THG)