Silicon vendor are jostling for position in the market for Blu Ray Disc (BRD) HDTV systems.
An HDTV BRD media centre will ship for the Christmas season for a fraction of the cost of current Blu Ray systems with silicon from STMicroelectronics, while LSI Logic has developed
a new chip architecture for this kind of system, which is also targeted by ARC’s
VRaptor processor 
announced last week.
ST has developed a prototype with its 7100 digital TV decoder and a Blu Ray Disc drive from Panasonic that has a bill of materials under $200 and will ship in retail for under $400 this Christmas. This is significantly less than BRD recorders and PC-based HDTV media centres, which both cost over $1,000.
This is also key for LSI Logic’s Domino X architecture, which uses an optimised video Risc core based on the SPARC
architecture coupled with a video digital signal processor and accelerator blocks for motion estimation and entropy processing to get real time transcoding of H.264 standard HD content into MPEG2 HD content.
It can also decode two streams of H.264 HD or Microsoft’s VC-1 HD format, and a chip based on this architecture would be used by a media centre to take H.264 content from broadcast or a Blu Ray Disc and convert it for existing MPEG2 HD-based boxes in 2008, said Kenroy Francis, director of marketing for Europe for LSI Logic. “We have a dual pipeline architecture and we are able to run things concurrently,” he said.
There is no cost penalty for this approach, as the architecture is also optimised to use cheaper 32-bit wide DDR memories, said Francis. “If you look at competing dual-channel decoder, in raw silicon we will be much more competitive and giving more advantage in system cost,” he said.