WinHEC 2005: Day 2

Home Entertainment (Cont'd)

Beyond the software side of the equation, hardware was emphasized as being increasingly important for enabling all of the rich media that users would desire. Microsoft suggests that home entertainment devices - particularly those that interact with the TV - need to be more than just functional. An attractive and easy to use interface was emphasized as a major portion of building a competitive product, and creating a device that features such a UI requires increasingly powerful hardware. Providing more powerful hardware at lower price points - which is what is really needed in order to get people to adopt these solutions - requires a modified approach to hardware design.



Current devices can often make use of "System on a Chip" (SoC) hardware. This provides all of the major components - processor, video, input/output, encryption, etc. - in a cost-effective package. In current devices, there are often auxiliary chips that provide additional features. Video and audio outputs are a candidate for a separate chip, and in many current solutions the encryption and video portions are also on separate chips. While not necessarily a bad design decision, the costs are usually higher and increased integration with the "Everything on a Chip" concept was suggested.



With further integration, external busses are reduced and performance of several key areas can be improved. Decoding and encoding of multiple simultaneous streams becomes possible. Why would you need support for that many streams? Imagine a system recording one stream, displaying a second stream, serving a third stream to a separate system over the network, and possibly running picture-in-picture as well. It's an extreme scenario, but Microsoft feels such usage patterns are realistic for the 2006-2007 timeframe, with support for as many as eight or more streams becoming necessary in the future.