Intel's GN40 for Atom Does 1080P, But Not Blu-ray
The Intel Atom isn’t a powerhouse processor – this we know and accept. But its multimedia capabilities could be helped with video acceleration, which is where Nvidia hopes to jump in with its Ion chipset. But not so fast, says Intel!
At the time of release, Intel said that its GN40 chips would handle 720P video playback – something that’s not possible on the currently popular 945GSE. Perhaps feeling a little bit more ambitious, an Intel representative insisted to websites that the GN40 is actually capable of 1080P video.
Intel came back to clarify this claim, now adding that the 1080P video that the GN40 would be able to decode wouldn’t be of Blu-ray quality. The official quote, as noted on Fudzilla, reads, “GN40 is designed to do 1080P HD playback for typical broadband internet content; it is not designed to enable full Blu-ray capability where the bitrates and demands of multi-layer content are significantly higher than that of internet HD content.”
Of course, we’re not likely to see Blu-ray drives paired with netbooks or even modest nettops, but it does confirm that the only type of HD that the GN40 can process with full confidence is 720P.
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s Ion is just chomping at the bit to bring 1080P to the Atom platform.
Alright you are aware that DVD was originally released in 1995 and took until 2002 to become mostly main stream.
I meant Intel only option on the Atom
Yes. I was dissapointed then, as LaserDisk was superior in quality, and VHS didn't have as many compatibility and duribility issues at that point. Since DVD was never intended to be portable, they should have just gone for a bigger form factor. I don't mean to suggest VHS was perfect, but to this day, I avoid DVDs because of their poor visual quality an sensitivity. Digital copies on flash drives are far more palpable.
BluRay is the 1st device where I can acualy not detect pixilation easily (other than analouge). Pixilation bothers me more than blurryness.
DVDs as a storage medium is also bad. Even with so calle 'high quality' meda, the disks produced at home are rarely compatible universally and often corrupt after a short time. Flash drives write more quickly, with more stability. VHS was more stable than DVD-R/RW/+R/RAM etc... DVDs are far more volitile than even CD-R's, which have a much better shelf life.
DVDs are a technological failure, and one I am glad we are moving away from. It has caused me little but frustration since it came out.
You would think it is unreasonable, but with OLED, I could see it hapening. I would be happy if they would go to 1024x800, as 600 is just about 150 pixels too short to have 2 pages of MS Word side by side.
...except that OLED is super expensive...
Price is important in netbooks... I don't think a netbook over $800 would sell very well.
The problem is not really the Nvidia chip set, but the DRM. Atom can't provide fast enough decryption in order to supply constant stream of data to the graphics chipset. If only the MPAA get their brains out of their a**es and remove DRM we might enjoy Blu-ray play back on small systems like ION and other Atom or ARM based.