Intel Unveils 'Sodaville' Chip for TV Set-Top Boxes

SAN FRANCISCO - The third day of the Intel Developer Forum opened with science fiction, and ended with the steps needed to make that fiction a reality. Intel announced its next-generation "Sodaville" chip for TV set-top boxes, which will be based on the Atom microprocessor.

LeVar Burton of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Reading Rainbow" fame, opened the day's events by reminding the gathered developers to keep dreaming. Burton pointed to the communicator used in the original "Star Trek," and noted how that flip communicator eventually influenced the design of a flip cell phone.

Burton joined Eric Kim, vice president and general manager of Intel's digital home division, to present a future TV concept experience, which merged live viewing with DVR functionality, sharing, emailed content, and social networking, including a video call.

Burton reminded the audience that the dream must exist before the reality. "Do not be afraid to dream that big dream: What if? What if? What if? What are the contributions that you will bring to make that dream a reality?" he asked.

Last year, Kim and Intel announced the CE3100, an integrated system-on-a-chip that could be used in set-top boxes to integrate the Internet on TVs. The announcement was a bombshell of sorts, a surprise partnership with Yahoo and its Widget Channel. The combination created a sidebar to the HDTV experience, allowing users to access weather, stocks, and other widgets while video was running in the background.

"But putting PC on a TV doesn't work; we know, we tried it," Kim said. "People want an immersive TV experience on their television." People want the power of the Internet on a TV, but they want it "simple," Kim said.

What's needed is a pure Internet development framework, Kim said – and the most popular version of that is Adobe's Flash technology. David Wadhwani, general manager of the platform business unit at Adobe, said that the company has opened Flash and removed all license fees, requiring only that manufacturers to open the platform to third-party developers, as part of the Open Screen initiative.

Wadhwani demoed Flash 10 running on an Intel processor, showing full-screen Flash browsing, not to a Web site, but to a custom screen designed by Disney.

The Sodaville processor uses an Atom core, and Intel has brought "Moore's Law" to shrink the processor to 45 nanometer technology. The Atom Processor CE4100, as it will be formally called, includes a 1080p video engine not to just decompress streams, but also recorded content supplied from another source, such as a hard drive. Intel doubled the speed of its 2D/3D engine, and added support for MPEG-4. The chip uses either DDR-2 or DDR-3 memory.

Intel also announced a reference platform and development kit.

Intel's Kim made the argument that devices like the television didn't really take off until there was both content and a business model – ads – that could support the format. Kim implied that IPTV, the technology behind the set-top box, was headed down the same path.

George Schweitzer, president of CBS marketing, claimed that people now don't watch TV, but manage video. CBS now has a TV widget. People now have more content than they know what to do with, he said. "The shows are out there, but we need to make it easier to find them," he said.

But the most compelling applications on the Internet are games, which normally require a game console like the Sony PlayStation 3. "But we know that there are an amazing array of Flash games on the Internet today ... so we know that consumers will enjoy playing Flash games on this device," Kim said.

However, Kim also said that Intel is "very intrigued" with actually playing older PC games on the CE device. "Suppose that PC games were regularly available by your TV service provider," Kim said. "Could this be beneficial to the service provider and consumers at home?

Not surprisingly, the answer was yes. Vikas Gupta, chief executive of TransGaming Technologies, announced TransGaming's service at gametree.tv, with such games as "Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3". Gupta said his firm is developing an SDK, and publishers can submit games to TransGaming to port the service to the TV platform. The business model supports purchase, rental, and subscription models.

Gametree.tv expects to launch in 2010, Gupta said.

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Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner was expected to present the traditional "grab bag" of R&D efforts in which Intel is involved, but instead discussed the future of television from a research perspective.

Rattner brought Yimin Zhang, a research scientist, out on stage to demonstrate an innovative technology in computer vision that scans a video image and maps it to data. For example, the demo showed a soccer match, with reach layer, the goal, and the ball, outlined with a square. The program identified each player and indexed the video by player, so that clips of each player's shot could be identified and searched for.

A second demo by Mark Yarvis, an Intel senior research scientist, used an Intel Mobile Internet Device design as a sensor. When Rattner brought his MID closer to the set-top box, the box sensed who he was and where he had been, and suggested video based on Rattner's preferences and his calendar.

But the real sizzle of Wednesday's presentation was provided by HDI and 3ality Digital, which gave their own "3D of the future" vision a unique spin.

HDI has developed a unique 100-inch laser scopic television system, which uses a super-high-speed LCOS engine that can scan over 1,000 frames per second, several times faster than even the fastest 240-Hz displays that were presented at last year's CES. The light source is a laser, which feeds three discrete engines that can reproduce any color scheme ever displayed, according to HDI executives.

Even more impressive was a 3D demonstration of 3DTV by 3ality Digital, the technology behind the ReadD technology used at some movie theaters. A massive 3D display was wheeled in, against which Rattner held a live 3D videoconference with Howard Postley, the chief executive officer and chief technical officer of 3ality. Every attendee was issued a pair of 3D glasses, taped underneath the chairs.

Each 3ality camera (there are two, one for each eye) outputs 3 Gbits/s, for a total of 6 Gbits/s, plus an additional 5 Gbits/s for metadata. That typically requires a mass of cables, and 3ality can issue as many as 45 sets of cameras to film a live event. An example of such was a U2:3D, a 3D recording of a U2 concert.

Not to worry, however: in the final demonstration, Intel's Rattner showed off a modified "Light Peak" optical cable from Wednesday's presentation, demonstrating that a 2 Gbyte file could be passed in one direction while an 8-Gbits/s HD stream (at twice the resolution of 1080p video) was passed in the other.

"Do you mean that I don't have to use all of this?" Postley asked, referring to the mass of cables.