This week, chip company Qualcomm announced its first “system-on-chip” for smart TVs, smart set-top boxes and smart digital media adapters at Consumer Electronics Show 2014.
The chip, introduced to focus on the smart generation of TV’s and similar equipment, features high-performance Krait general-purpose cores, powerful Adreno 330 graphics engine as well as advanced video engines and necessary input/output interfaces. Named Snapdragon 802 to keep on with the Snapdragon series, we will see the mighty chip offer Hexagon digital signal processor (which supports Dolby Digital and DTS surround sound technologies), Qualcomm’s Hollywood Quality Video (HQV) processing engine that supports up-converting of 1080p content to ultra HD resolutions (e.g., 3840*2160 pixels), 4K video decoder, memory controller and much more. In addition, the chip sports dual-band Qualcomm Vive Wi-Fi 802.11ac controller.
In order to simplify development of consumer electronics devices powered by Snapdragon 802 and Android operating system, Qualcomm has developed a custom Google Android software framework based on Kit Kat version of the OS. We will see this chip and others based on it in the future, offer high-quality video games and rich graphics user interfaces in addition to high-quality video playback and support for up-converting to 4K resolution
The Snapdragon 802 processor will begin sampling early this year and is expected to be in commercial devices by late 2014, according to Qualcomm.
