tequila bomb

An Intel executive confirmed yesterday that Intel will add hardware acceleration for Google’s newly opened VP8/WebM codec to its TV-oriented Atom CE Systems-on-Chips should the new format become widely used. Intel is currently promoting its Atom CE4100 chip to TV companies for use in “Smart TVs” and set-top boxes, bringing Internet connectivity and streaming media to the TV.

Intel’s Atom is being used inside Google TV.

Intel don’t actually make the GPUs in the Atom. Imagination Technologies do. It’s the same range of GPUs found in the iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone.

Basically the Atom is a cut down Intel CPU with an over-clocked mobile GPU slapped on the side. This makes them very power hungry when doing anything even remotely exciting. Which is why these devices are not being used in mobile phones (yet) and are being touted as Web TV silicon.

Perhaps Intel’s plan is to do the acceleration on the CPU side. After-all that’s what they have been known to do with their desktop silicon to improve overall benchmarks for their units with IGPs.

It’s worth noting that ARM’s CPUs already offer a wide range of acceleration features with their NEON instruction set. And ARM have already said that they can offer acceleration for VP8 and WebM.

…the VP8 codec is already optimized for Cortex-A/v7A class processors with the NEON SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) engine. NEON allows the ARM CPU to work on multiple bits of data in parallel, and optimizations for ARM11 processors are also available. With NEON-enabled Cortex-A8 and Qualcomm Snapdragon high-end smartphones shipping today, and dual core Cortex-A9 shipping by the end of the year, there are many devices already on the market that will be able to take advantage of WebM.

When I first read the title of this story I thought, rather cynically perhaps, that Intel just wanted to be first, or best, at something related to the mobile / set-top box marketplace for once. Now I see they are just following the herd… from a fair way behind.

With a number of embedded processor and GPU vendors already announcing that they will support hardware-accelerated decoding of VP8 video, Intel’s pragmatic decision is unsurprising. The CE4100 can decode two streams of H.264, VC-1, or MPEG 2 video, or one stream of MPEG 4 Part 2 (popularized with codecs like DivX and Xvid)—all chosen because of their substantial market penetration. Should VP8 achieve any success, adding support is an obvious move.

VLC is quite simply the only media player I use on OS X.

Direct download links for PPC, Intel (32Bit), and Intel (64Bit) versions for OS X.

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework, that plays most multimedias files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.

It is simple to use, yet very powerful and extendable.

New Features

• GPU and DSP decoding, depending on the platform
• Faster and more stable
• New codecs and HD codecsenhancements
• Webm and VP8 support
• MKV, mp4 and avi improvements
• Extensions
• Important code cleanup and rewrite
• Interface and playlist reworked
• Completly Free