As I mentioned in an earlier entry, there is a high chance that I’ll use the Atom based mini-ITX board from Intel as my HTPC platform. It seems that the board is actually capable of 1080HD playback as evidenced in the following video.
This system uses the D945GCLF board with an Intel Atom 230 1,6GHz HT and 256MB 533MHz DDR2 memory only! It claims to use passive cooling and would be very quiet if so. The movie is a 1080p film encoded in WMV9 or VC1 format. This is not as computationally intensive as H264 but is a good indicator. So, the board is definitely powerful enough to watch HD video encoded in MPEG4 and equivalent codecs.
I smell disaster for Intel here. If people catch on that this is all that they need for a regular computer, who is going to fork out 3 times as much for a dual core or even more for a quad core machine. And once people clue into this fact, what’s to stop system builders from building non-Intel low end machines like ARM or MIPS based systems.
Interesting.
Sybreon Ones Nought 