Royal Philips Electronics introduced the PNX1700, the newest member of the company?s
Nexperia? family of media processors with high-definition (HD) capabilities.
Combining media processing, network connectivity and display enhancement on a single chip,
the PNX1700 is designed to deliver unprecedented picture quality of streaming movies, news,
digital photos and TV programs. It doubles the performance of previous generations while
maintaining both hardware and software compatibility. Digital Connected Consumer devices
enabled by the PNX1700 include IP set-top boxes, digital media adapters, personal video
recorders, videophones and TVs.
Gartner Research predicts that by 2008, nearly one in three homes worldwide will have
broadband Internet connection, supported by consumer demand for electronics and PC
devices that can stream digital media content, such as broadcast television, movies, music
and games. As a result of increasing demand for digital content, consumer electronics
manufacturers are seeking media processors with the ideal combination of high performance
and low cost.
The PNX1700 features a new 500MHz+ super-pipelined TriMedia? CPU core, winner of the
prestigious Best Media Processor award from Microprocessor Forum in 2004, based on its
combination of high-performance and compatibility. It supports decoding of HD video formats,
including Windows Media Video, DivX, MPEG-4 and MPEG-2. Furthermore, the PNX1700 can
simultaneously encode and decode full D1 resolution MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video, making it
ideal for personal video recorder applications. The PNX1700 also includes new instructions to
optimize encoding and decoding of H.264 video, and it supports standard definition (SD) to HD
up-conversion with advanced de-interlacing.
Availability
The PNX1700 is supported by a complete development package including hardware reference
design, C-compiler, debugger, and extensive software codecs and applications software. The
PNX1700 will sample to select customers in June, with volume production scheduled for Q3
2005.