Codebreaker

Google TV switches to new chip, tries again

John Moe Jan 5, 2012

Google TV is rapidly becoming the David Bowie of home entertainment technologies, constantly reinventing itself, coming up with new personae and new collaborators. Hasn’t really achieved a breakout hit, though. No Ziggy Stardust equivalent. Or even Let’s Dance, really. Now it’s teamed up with Marvell and will use Marvell’s chip to try to achieve faster performance and better energy efficiency.

Take it away, geek chow blurb from Mashable:

Marvell’s solution is the ARMADA 1500 Media System-on-a-Chip. It’s a single chip that will allow device makers and OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) to offer 3D video, high-definition video processing, web processing and 3D games.
It’s powered by a dual-core ARM v/6/7 CPU and paired with Marvell’s Odeo video processing technology. It’s powerful enough to decode two simultaneous 1080p streams, yet energy efficient enough to not require external fans.

Translated to real life, this means making TVs more like smart phones, better app usage, more connectivity to other devices so its easier to, say, watch a movie on your Android phone and then pick it up on your Google TV enabled TV. Marvell gets a big partner, Google gets a better chip and gets to expand the Android platform to more places to try to make it a more inescapable ubiquitous ecosystem before Apple reaches customers seeking such a thing.

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