Long term profits is directly linked to

a) needs in the market
b) development cost and time

Nobody - not in this economy - wants to put down significant resources on a box we saw two people on this site say they wanted, and then one of them retracted it - only to sell to a handful of customers. And for good reason.

Therefore there is nobody willing to make an integrated video playback box and router combination. It would just cost too much - too much for the router market (imagine a $400 ADSL router) and too much for the home media market (imagine a $400 Roku box).

You can buy both boxes for less than $99 already. There is no way people will jump for the "digital convergence" of having one box that does it all when it's plain to see that this one box would be both expensive and impractical in most households.
Everyone already got their $40 coupon and bought an ATSC box already, if they didn't go out and buy a new HDTV for the built-in tuner that is.

Getting into the "they're turning off analogue soon!" market is about 12 months too late, considering we'd have a month to cobble together off the shelf parts and add it to a non-x86 prototype reference board and give people value for money on their $40 coupon as it is.

Adding HD media support to the Efika would cost more than the Efika, and nobody is looking to subsidize this.

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Matt Sealey

if there were a pcie slot i probably would have done it by now. (if i had an efika). newer ati card can decode 3 or 4 high def video codecs. not power efficient though. but that combination would work perfectly for the tv; small, lower power than a huge desktop, quiet (not sure about graphics fan, but what choice is there).

i have almost thought about getting an efika for this and using an agp graphics card, 2 reasons i didnt , the cpu is just tiny bit too slow, and pci/agp graphics are deprecated.

On Linux or MorphOS? You're kidding, right?

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Matt Sealey

it probably helps if people took the time to keep up with current events and near term market forces,its commonly refered to as the ATI HD "UVD" ASIC, much the same as the cuda/VS2 ASIC HD video decoder inside the NV chips.

it does have its problems OC, in that its not as flexable as the 3rd party FPGA/ASIC referenced elswere.

theres also the added problem right now, that Mr bridgeman the ATI/AMD Executive in charge of the current code/documentation releases and market push, has been asked to work with the open code initatives and provide the equivanent NV/VS2 ATI UVD API documentation were he stated in the very professional developer relations manner last week
"we are going to look into opening up UVD, I just can't make any commitments until we have actually gone through the investigation and it won't be quick. ...." and this will take at the very least months to get to that point for open source initatives.

the one point of light at the moment (but probably not relevant in this case), is this, he also said "I expect fglrx will have it sooner" when refering to that long month on months wait for the open source vendors.

potentially that means any org or business looking to use and/or port the closed ATI/AMD fglrx driver or use any of the "UVD" capabilitys could potentialy get hold of the required API documentation and impliment it into their products.... :arrow:

It's now "later in the week", so what is that? :-)

A TI OMAP development board? Just guessing... A production board usually doesn't have external connectors on more than one side.

We will post some news on this today or tomorrow (still this week). You will note we are in the process of preparation...

http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/projects.php

The "EFIKA2" has been our way of describing what is next for at least the last three to four years. The first EFIKA came to market with the 5200 and was launched at FTF 2005.

http://www.genesi-usa.com/press/2005/6/24/

At the Forum, Genesi also introduced the EFIKA 5K2, a MPC5200 Performance Evaluation Board. Genesi will now work with graphics card manufacturers to optimize the board through the use of the onboard PCI support in order to transition to a smaller two chip board solution targeted at mobile and embedded applications.

The first "EFIKA2" was the next version which featured the 5200B, an updated version of the 5200. These boards first shipped in November 2006 and continue to be sold today.

In the meanwhile, the next "EFIKA2" was planned around the 5121e/5123, but after a significant amount of development we have abandoned this effort. The chip went through too many revisions and we wasted significant time and money supporting THTF/LimePC and Cherrypal without compensation or reward. Our conclusion: 1) the 5121e/5123 is not well-suited for consumer products that require a desktop environment, and 2) the 5121e/5123 was designed as an embedded processor and will find success in the industrial and automotive segments. Nevertheless, we did our best to support Freescale and have maintained this effort until very recently:

http://en.opensuse.org/MPC5121eADS

All that to say, the next "EFIKA2" will truly be something new, so please stay tuned...

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

New = ARM

I'd say 8610...

"All that to say, the next "EFIKA2" will truly be something new, so please stay tuned...

R&B :)
"

you two could try something more exciting than those

"truly" "something NEW", lets play.... :D

moto found a load of bottom bin PPC based Cell with 4 working parts that they want to sell for $25/$35 to you.....

Toshiba "SpursEngine" stream processor yealds are far better than expected and so they have called you up to offer you their bottom bin for a new low power PCB at a very good price to kick start the mass uptake before they get around to putting them in the worlds HDTVs.....

ATI/AMDs latest HD4xxx mobile recycle has an unexpected addition to the core Gfx chip in that it also has a new "UVD2" ASIC with a CPU more powerful than any PPC based CPU SOC so your giving them a try to put something onto the market :D but the Altivec lads wont be pleased as theres no easy SIMD for them play with.

or OC theres aways the do as everyone else does and use the usual mobile phone SOC in whatever revision their kicking out this week.....

I'd like to say it too. But BBRV emphasized "truly someting new".

Nice ideas, "popper", but I think there must be less awkward ways... 8^)

The 8610 is nothing new, I had one on my desk for the past half year :-) Well, this is the reason, why I want it in a smaller form factor and in a silent case (the current one is in a loud server case...).

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

There is no driver, not even in the binary ones, ATI will not give a schedule for it and may only expose it through a custom "XvBAW" API.

This is not going to get you playing videos right now and it would be insanity to develop a product around it.

We recently finished off a marketing requirements/product requirements document for something, and one of the things we agreed to cut out completely was support for an ATI graphics chip (the E2400) because there are no open-source 3D drivers for RV680 and waiting for them to get stable, or commissioning a binary driver in lieu of that, would not be cost-effective considering the very few benefits of having an external graphics chip.

That's just how it works. You have an idea, if it has too many negatives, it gets cut out.

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Matt Sealey

indeed, hence bridgeman's "we are going to look into opening up UVD" and "I expect fglrx will have it sooner" clearly NV and their documented VS2 ASIC and code were not expected by bridgman etc and he's only now thinking of some kind of support and how to respond to the demand for UVD API information...

developers are already working with the NV VS2 ASIC, CoreAVC NV etc, and could potentially also use any API information that might be released in a few months if bridgeman gets his act together, but not any time soon.

but all credit to Bridgeman, he was upfront about it, and clearly stated "until we have actually gone through the investigation and it won't be quick." so he's actually investigating the potential rather than outright refusing to even consider it, and clearly states its not going to be a quick process.

Right. One more and you're banned.

You have absolutely no insight into the product development process. Please stop with the veiled snipes about whether you think we're doing the right thing or not.

ATI drivers are not going to have UVD video playback in any driver until some UNKNOWN date in the future, if at all, and nobody has the details of any potential new API which this will be exposed with except the name.

Product development around rumours is bad business.

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Matt Sealey