Set-top boxes
The other Intel manifestation of Imagination's IP King-Smith was able to discuss is in the CE 3100 - a consumer electronics optimised SoC formerly known as Canmore. We asked him to tell us more.
"This is the second generation of their set-top box chip," said King-Smith. "They previously had one called the CE 2110, which was one of their last XScale, ARM based ones before they moved away from all of that. The CE 3100 uses our graphics to enable a high performance TV UI. Gigabyte is actually making that box, but there are a lot of people using Canmore already, including some major customers down in Asia."
The box in question is shown below, as is the GUI, through which you can browse actual content rather than just the written descriptions you find in a standard electronic programme guide (EPG).
We asked why we need all this processing power in a boring old set-top box. "If you look inside a set-top box, the processor has been quite powerful for quite a few years," said King-Smith.
"When you're doing the digital processing of something you receive on, for example, Freeview, there's quite a lot of general purpose processing of things like security, formatting, EPG and all of the intelligence that sits behind the user interface. In addition to that, people are looking for improved graphics processing so that they can provide more sophisticated graphical user interfaces.