14 DAY TRIAL // At its ongoing Intel Developer Forum, Intel has now unveiled a processor which, instead of being aimed at some sort of PC or another, is intended for HDTVs and other 'smart' consumer electronics, its Full HD multimedia and 3D support being just two of its assets.
Intel has already offered a preview of its Sandy Bridge processors, even revealing the logos and exhibiting a die shot.
The Santa Clara, California-based company has even unveiled a motherboard powered by the P67 chipset, which should act as a platform for these LGA 1155 chips.
These hardware items will be the main force in Intel's marketing tactics for 2011, but they will hardly be the only ones to emerge.
In fact, the same chip maker has now addressed a segment it has not, so far, had great dominion over, namely that of consumer electronics.
Such devices have been gaining more and more PC-like capabilities, warranting actual processors to work.
As such, the company brought out the CE4200, the successor to the CE4100 that was introduced some time ago, though it hasn't become particularly widespread.
The newcomer, the CE4200, based on the 45nm manufacturing process technology, seems to be a fair bit more competent.
The SoC features 512 kB of L2 cache, along with support for DDR2 and DDR3, plus an integrated NAND controller.
Also, in terms of actual performance, it boasts a clock speed of 1.2 GHz and can handle not only Full HD video playback (1,080p), but also 3D and H.264 high-definition encoding.
For those interested, the codename of this product is Groveland and it should end up as part of next-generation HDTVs or set-top boxes.
ADB, Sagecom, Technicolor and Samsung have, according to the press release of the central processing units developer, already decided to make use of the Atom CE4200 in their upcoming multimedia solutions.