UPDATED 11:03 EDT / JANUARY 05 2011

MIPS Reveals New Chip at CES with Android Expectations

MIPS_logo Perhaps people have been noticing that a lot more commercials are arriving to tout Internet TV set-top boxes, driving video through handheld devices, and other amazing innovations. As the war for eyeballs and dollars heats up, the technology that underlies also needs to gear up to prove itself. MIPS Technologies, a chip design firm, produces the chips that go into a lot of these devices and at this year’s CES 2011, they’ve moved deeper into Internet TV territory with their SmartCE platform.

VentureBeat has written up a strong article on the benefits of the new MIPS platform and how it will relate in the new market. As it integrates Android, Flash, Skype and a myriad of other technologies, it’s extremely well positioned to bring us all the glitz and glitter of Internet TV:

The platform, unveiled for the first time this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (the biggest tech extravaganza of the year), is being demonstrated by a number of licensees. The platform integrates Android, Adobe Flash platform for TV, Skype, the Home Jinni ConnecTV application (which brings search to internet content on the TV), social media and other applications. SmartCE will ensure that all of that software runs smoothly on MIPS-based digital TVs, set-top boxes, and Blu-ray players.

By doing this, MIPS hopes to hold off any encroachment on its turf by ARM’s newest processors and Intel’s Atom chips, which are designed for lower-power applications. Licensees using SmartCE include Sigma Designs, ViXS Systems, Silicon Integrated Systems, Trident Microsystems, Zoran, and others. Devices that use the licensee chips will be able to run YouTube, Netflix, Yahoo Movies, Facebook, Skype, and Adobe Flash content. Consumers will also be able to use smartphones and tablet computers as remote controls for their electronics gear.

The new chips appear to be extremely well designed for running Google TV and becoming the foundation upon which they want that evolution built. Already, Logitech Revue commercials on TV are touting Google TV and soon it will become a household name (an effect Google is good at.) The new MIPS platform already competes against Intel’s Atom and ARM’s new chips, so they’re probably making this move in order to give themselves a position in the new market. As the article mentions, this offer will give them hope to hold off encroachment into their territory by Intel and ARM.

Include the addition of Android software and consumers will be thrust also into the vast ecology of the Android marketplace when they’re looking for extending their ability to control their television watching habits. We will probably be seeing app developers thinking of what set-top devices they might combine with handsets and how they might do that. I am looking forward to otherwise-mobile video games that project themselves onto the television from handsets, making the handset the video game controller (and display) and the TV the large display. Perhaps even channel changing apps that display a preview of the new channel on the mobile device, while leaving the current program on the television unadulterated. The possibilities are quite expansive.

While many chip makers are driving towards smartphone technology, this doesn’t seem to be angled towards that. In fact, both of the low-power rival chips may angle further into mobile and away from set-top boxes (which do not need to be low-power) and into the remote controls instead. Qualcomm, in fact, a company that produces chips for mobiles has already made an acquisition of a company that does communication technology.

The next stages of this microchip race will probably lead to more interconnectivity between mobile devices and the set-top devices. Communication and interoperability will become the new selling point. In general, most will probably go to wireless Ethernet and connect with local area networks in the home (as most people have those) but phones also commonly use Bluetooth for radio communication, so we might see set-top devices enabled with that in order to allow an iPhone or Android app to control them.


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