While CES doesn’t seem to be able to make up its mind when it comes to smartphones or mobile tech, it certainly knows it’s the face of TV and entertainment technology. If you’ve been keeping a peg on things outside of the mobile realm at this year’s CES then you’ll have noted some pretty awesome stuff when it comes to TVs. OLED is finally going to be hitting our living rooms and 4K seems to be fast becoming the new 1080p in terms of availability. Samsung, in particular, have announced some pretty cool stuff on the TV front this year. All of this is great and all but, with higher pixel counts the future is going to need a very speedy chip, indeed to power it all.
This is where Broadcom are hoping to come in and have announced plans surrounding a chip that will handle everything the future of our living rooms and help push all the pixels we could ever want – at least for now anyway. In typical fashion, Broadcom have given their new chip a name only a mother could love and it’s simply dubbed the BCM7445.
This new chip might be an ARM-based quad-core processor but, it’s not something you’re going to find inside your next smartphone or tablet, those duties are going to be left to Qualcomm, Nvidia and Samsung going forward. What makes the BCM7445 special is that it supports a lot of important standards entertainment devices are going to be using in the near future. The chip supports H.265 and UltraHD content, it’s max output will be 4096 x 2160 at 60 frames a second. If H.265 sounds familiar to you then you might be familiar with H.264, a codec that is commonly used in the streaming of HD content, H.265 does the same however, it will stream 1080p video while using less than half the bandwidth and will also support 4K HD content.
Going forward, this sort of chip could be at the heart of GoogleTV boxes, while we’ve not heard much concerning Google partnering with Broadcom, such a chip would certainly allow Google TV to ready itself for the future of 4K “UltraHD” content. At the moment though, it looks as though Google are very happy to drive the prices of these boxes down and down, which is a good strategy as getting into the door of the living room is perhaps hard enough as it is.
If you knew your next Google TV could handle anything you were to throw are it – with the help of this chip – would you pay extra for it?
[Source: CNET]