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MillimeterFields & Frames
Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
Good things still come in small packages. At IBC 2005, Teranex debuted its Mini, a palm-sized DTV format converter that delivers the “industry-leading” image quality the company's products are known for, according to Jed Deame, co-founder and general manager of the Orlando, Fla.-based company. The Mini converts SD video to and from HD in real time, making it a good choice for HD monitoring. (“It outputs production-quality video, not just monitoring level,” says Deame.) But, as it's expected to price at less than $7k, the Mini could also become a hot item for budget-conscious post work, since Teranex's unique ultra-high-speed signal processing approach enables video quality that many consider tops. Producers could upconvert DV sources to HD and even deliver the final product in both SD and HD simultaneously by routing the SDI output back through the Mini on playout. The price breakthrough comes from a three-year, $30 million investment by parent Silicon Optix, which squeezed Teranex's massive parallel processing chipsets into one chip, the Realta HQV. ▪ At the fall Intel Developer Forum, the chip manufacturer announced what it called a major change in its next-generation CPU architecture, scheduled to deliver in the second half of 2006. For starters, all notebook, desktop, and server CPUs will use multiple CPU cores. The first-generation models — Pentium Processor Extreme and D series — have already been released. ▸ The dual-core processors also mark a decision by Intel to de-emphasize clock speed as an end in itself, fronting multitasking and better power management instead. This change in design philosophy came about because its processor design hit a wall: Faster clock speeds required more power, but turning up the wattage resulted in ever higher amounts of current leakage — not to mention heat — which ended up wreaking havoc on the processor's performance. ▸ So forget pure speed, smarter chips are the answer. Justin Rattner, head of Intel Labs, says, “Intel's 2015 Platform Initiative calls for self-managing and self-healing systems.” ▪ Today's Wi-Fi is starting to look like yesterday's technology. It's just too slow to keep pace with our increasingly mobile lifestyles and proliferating mobile gear. Although Bluetooth still leads in close-range communications, Wi-Fi could gain a leg up with the new 802.11n flavor. Delivering next year, it will offer 10X the throughput of standard Wi-Fi, enough for streaming HD between devices within the home, according to a Business Week article. ▸ MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output), a new cellular technology, could allow the streaming of high-resolution video over cell phones by 2006. ▪ Meanwhile, Intel used WiMAX, another high-speed wireless technology, to stream the Sundance premiere of David LaChapelle's film Rize from Salt Lake City. Ultra Wideband (UWB), which works over short distances, is already in use by Freescale Semiconductor and its Chinese OEM partner, Haier. A UWB-enabled Haier LCD TV and server were recently demonstrated delivering a 110Mbps wireless datastream, enough for a couple of MPEG-2 video streams. The 1080i-capable, 37in. Haier V6 TV and server combo will be sold in the United States next year.
