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New Visual Technologies TV Gets Up To Speed With Tablets STMicroelectronics has launched a new home entertainment platform designed to improve the consumer’s experience of connected TV. The company’s fourth generation of STMicroelectronics’ consumer home entertainment products is based on the multicore ARM Cortex A9 chip. The company claims the chip is 20-30% more energy-efficient than its predecessor, offers excellent 3D application handling, and excellent quality and customisation potential. It builds on STMicroelectronics’ Faroudja technology, which it acquired and has developed. In this new version, it has improved and extended its audio capabilities to help compensate for the poor speaker design, and consequent bad audio performance, of many flatscreen TVs. The new platform is being offered both to makers of set-top boxes and to TV manufacturers who are integrating the technology into their products. A recent Display Search report predicted that by 2013, more than 38% of new flatpanel TVs will be connected to the Internet through a TVbased browser. Luigi Mantellassi, Vice- President of the company’s Home Entertainment and Displays Group, said that the company has the wherewithal to offer its users a hand: “We do produce reference designs, especially for early adopters. The level of expertise we have in-house is very high, but we rely on our partners to make the products.” One of the chip’s main advantages is that it extends the potential for convergence and interoperability between TVs, tablets and other screens. In the past, TV’s processing power has been significantly inferior to that of other devices. This chip, Mantellassi says, has an equal or higher level of performance than the most advanced tablets currently on sale. “In the move to multi-screen, having a platform which has such interoperability is a strong requirement,” he added. Mantellassi’s pleased STMicroelectronics is at IFA, both to showcase STMicroelectronics products and to examine the market. “IFA is a unique opportunity to see what happens next. We see confirmation of some of the requirements we’ve anticipated, which is great,” he said. “We need to understand what trends are gaining. It’s a race of anticipation.” Hall 9 Stand 112 Luigi Mantellassi Vice-President of the company’s Home Entertainment and Displays Group: “We need to understand what trends are gaining” Raising the bar on Android Gaming The NVIDIA Tegra processor powers devices including the Motorola Atrix, LG Optimus 2X, Samsung Galaxy R, ASUS Transformer, Acer Iconia A500 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, as well as new tablets from Sony and Lenovo. Next generation GeForce GPU installed in the NVIDIA Tegra 2 is tailored to meet the growing demands of current and future mobile use cases. Tegra 2 includes a high performance GPU architecture that has several unique optimizations that not only deliver near console quality graphics and performance, but also ultralow power consumption. Because of its desktop GPU roots, the hardware pipeline of the GeForce GPU is optimized and prepared to handle the performance requirements of mobile games featuring PC and console quality graphics features. NVIDIA works closely with leading game developers to bring a console-quality gaming experience to mobile devices and several game titles such as Backbreaker THD, Galaxy on Fire 2 THD, Riptide GP, Fruit Ninja THD, Monster Madness, Dungeon Defenders First Wave Deluxe HD, Sprinkle and more for users of Tegrapowered mobile devices. NVIDIA continues to work with developers to raise the bar on Android gaming and bring even more exciting PC and console class games to mobile devices. Hall 15.1 Stand 110 The NVIDIA Tegra processor www.ifa-international.org IFA International • Tuesday 6 th September 2011 31
