Asus' J1800I-C Bay Trail Motherboard Spotted
Biostar, MSI, and Gigabyte have all announced their J1800 based motherboards and now Asus is joining the fray. The motherboard is a low-power board intended for use in kiosks and light, everyday computing systems.
The Celeron J1800 CPU is a dual-core Bay Trail processor that has a base frequency of 2.41 GHz and a Turbo frequency of 2.58 GHz. It has 1 MB of L2 cache. The GPU aboard has a frequency of 688 MHz, with a maximum dynamic frequency of 792 MHz. In its entirety, the CPU has a TDP of only 10 Watts. The CPU is cooled by a gold-colored passive heatsink.
The Mini-ITX board has room for up to two DDR3-SODIMM memory banks and features two SATA2 ports, a single Mini-PCIe slot, and a PCI-Express 1x slot. Rear I/O connectivity is handled by a single legacy PS/2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, a single USB 3.0 port, HDMI, VGA, a serial COM port, as well as analogue stereo audio.
Pricing for the board is expected to sit around $60.
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With pretty much all low-end CPUs and tons of low-end SoCs supporting hardware decode these days, there isn't much of a reason left for anything semi-recent to struggle with 1080p/h264 decoding. If you want to do 2160p/h265, that could be a different story.
All variants I see have HD Graphics and the J1800's page also says it supports QuickSync - the article even quotes the IGP's clock specs.
http://ark.intel.com/products/series/77504/Intel-Celeron-Processor-J1000-Series-for-Desktop
The Atom-based Celerons are supposed to compete against ARM in low-power, low-cost applications. The J1800 would be next to worthless compared to Snapdragon and Exynos if it did not have 3D and video decode acceleration.
Quick sync is a hardware encoder not decoder.
Recently I was in the market looking for a cheap celeron / amd E series apu based laptops. None of the celeron had hardware decoders. But these celerons had 35W tdp and could play 1080p vids on software mode. They had only 2.5 hr of battery life with video watching. So I bought E1 based laptop instead. The tdp was only 16W but it had hardware decoder. My laptop has about 6 hours of battery life with video watching.
While QuickSync's main claim to fame is encode acceleration, it also does decode.
BTW, Celerons and Pentiums "not supporting" QuickSync was just Intel artificially crippling them by withholding driver support until a week ago.
http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2014/02/24/chip-shot-latest-intel-graphics-drivers-now-support-intel-quick-sync-video-on-pentium-and-celeron-processors
It's great if it can decode too. I had checked for celeron 1000m which I was going to buy. Compared to the celeron from news this was much more powerful but it didn't have either quick sync or Clear HD video.