digital music/video
09/21/2006, 6:15pm, EDT
Thursday, September 21st
New Intel chip to power Apple's iTV?
Apple's iTV media streaming device -- which was introduced on September 12th at the company's special event in San Francisco -- might use a new value chip from Intel which is set to launch within the same timeframe, according to Electronista. Walt Disney CEO Bog Iger recently confirmed the presence of a hard drive in the small wireless relay device, which would likely require a CPU powerful enough to decode H.264 high definition video using at least the 640 x 480 resolution of videos purchased from its own iTunes Music Store. The new Intel chip, currently codenamed "Pentium E1000," is a stripped-down version of the Core 2 desktop platform that uses only a single core and 1MB of L2 cache. This reduction lowers the costs and power requirements such that a device like Apple's iTV could make use of an E1000 variant without compromising Apple's desired $299 price tag.
Filed under: industry
Other story tags: digital music/video
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obviously my tests were unscientific and the specs of iTV are unkown, but not being able to play HD would be a shame.
Poor quality video on your big-screen TV! :-p
I purchased "Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion" (Mira Sorvino is soooo hot in that film) last week. The names in the credits were blocky (due to the fact that motion is going on behind them) and diagonals had really bad tearing (name tags of the workers in the dealership we very annoying). I've seen VCDs with better quality. I wouldn't dare put that on my 37" Sharp Aquos.
The file was aproximately 1 GB and took only 20 minutes to download from iTunes. I really think that the file should have been at least 50% larger to reduce artifacting. But, obviously, Apple is sacrficing quality for speed of download which is a bad choice in my opinion.