Intel Rolls Out A System-on-a-Chip

The Intel CE 2110 promises to be a jack of all trades for consumer electronics.

What’s under the hood of your next set-top DVR could soon look a lot closer to the guts of your personal computer – and it might just be sporting an "Intel Inside" badge. On Monday,Intel released details regarding its new CE 2110 Media Processor, a Swiss army knife ofa chip that will provide memory, graphics processing and hardware decoding all in a single package.

Intel fittingly calls the new architecture a "system-on-a-chip," or SoC. The CE 2210 will feature a 1 GHz Intel XScale CPU, MPEG-2 and H.264 hardware video decoders, DDR2 memory interface,as well as 2D and 3D graphics accelerators.

All that computing horsepower is necessary to drive the next generation of consumer electronics, which offer hardware-intensive features like Voice over IP (VoIP), video phone service, interactivegaming, karaoke and electronic learning tools.

ASUS will be one of the first hardware vendors to use Intel’s new chip in a soon-to-be released DVR. “As far as the set top box is concerned, one of the mostimportant capabilities will be processing performance that can scale to meet the requirements of advanced applications and support new services,” said CY Feng, vice president of ASUS BroadbandBU, in a release. "Intel’s platform solution is designed to be a multifunction device, and in this respect, it stands apart from traditional set top boxes."

Other adopters include Digeo, which will implement the CE 2210 in its new Moxi Multi-Room HD digitalmedia recorders, RADVISION which will use it to deliver VoIP and video conferencing capabilities, and Chunghwa Telecom, which will use it to provide multimedia on demand and karaoke in Taiwan.