Intel 854 Chipset and Development Platform, Intel Digital Media Infrastructure Software Enable Faster Time-To-Market, Interoperability
Continuing to deliver a broad family of PC, consumer electronics (CE) and mobile platforms and technologies designed to work simply and easily together inside the digital home, Intel today announced a CE platform and software solution that will help enable faster time-to-market and ensure that CE devices, such as IP-digital set top boxes (IP-STB) and digital media recorders (DMR) work well together.
The Intel 854 Development Platform includes the new Intel 854 chipset and is a scalable, high performance building block for CE applications and platforms. The Intel 854 platform enables CE developers to bring flexibility and application-handling performance of Intel Architecture computing to the world of CE devices.
"Intel's vision of the digital home is an environment where consumers can easily access content wherever and whenever they want in the home, using a variety of PC and networked devices that easily communicate and work together," said Glenda Dorchak, vice president, general manager, Consumer Electronics Group, Intel's Digital Home Group. "The Intel 854 platform and software solution enables CE developers to address many of the design and performance needs and deliver more advanced devices to consumers while helping reduce total system cost."
Intel works closely with CE developers worldwide to bring advanced features to CE devices. These developers include: Eriya, Gigabyte, Handan BroadInfoCom, Hopen, Media Excel, Neusoft, Oregan Networks, Samsung, Tatung, Thomson and Toshiba Corporation.
Intel today also made available the next generation of the Intel? Digital Media Infrastructure middleware solution to help developers design to the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) guidelines and the Intel? Networked Media Product Requirements (Intel NMPR), which helps ensure CE devices and Intel architecture-based platforms work well together.
Intel Digital Media Infrastructure version 3 is an extensible middleware solution that is fully optimized and validated for a variety of CE platforms. It provides developers with an out-of-the-box networking connectivity, device discovery and media content sharing solution based on open industry-based specifications to build highly interoperable CE platforms for the digital home.
High Performance Chipsets and Development Platform
The scalable Intel 854 Development Platform enables CE device manufacturers to minimize bill-of-materials and development by reducing design complexity and by providing the performance needed to handle video decoding and other functionality in software that in turn simplifies hardware designs and minimizes bill-of-materials costs.
The Intel 854 chipset adds support for up to 2 GB of DDR 333 MHz system memory, an integrated graphics engine that can be used for graphical user interfaces, and a 400 MHz system bus to support the Intel Celeron M processor. The 600 MHz Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) Intel? Celeron M processor offers high performance and very low power consumption. Platforms based on this processor and chipset require only a passive (fan-less) thermal solution. In addition to integrated 10/100 LAN support, the new chipset supports up to six USB 2.0/1.1 ports, two Ultra ATA/100 (IDE) channels for disk drives and storage devices.
The Intel 854 Development Platform includes a six-layer printed circuit board with 512 MB of DDR on-board, which allows a high level of platform design flexibility. The platform also provides the performance to support a variety of software CODECs including MPEG-2, MPEG-4.2, MPEG-4.10 (H.264), and Microsoft Windows Media 9*. It includes a board support package for the Microsoft Windows CE 5.0* operating system that provides developers with a significant time-to-market advantage.
Additional technical information about the Intel 854 chipset, the Intel 854 Development Platform, and Intel Digital Media Infrastructure software is available at http://developer.intel.com/design/celect/.