Broadcom BCM7440 powers up the nextgen players

[hmurchison]

Broadcom announces the new BCM7440

Today Broadcom announces a replacement chipset for the BCM7411 found in the Toshiba A1 and perhaps other players. Like NEC's recent announcement of a chip that handles both platforms Broadcom is seriously beefing up the support in this new chipset. After perusing through both PDFs here are some of the salient improvements in the new chip versus the older BCM7411.

The BCM7440 offers:

Improved Video support
Divx and WM-9 support
Picture support -JPG,PNG, MNG,GIF,RLE with 2D graphics engine
6 integrated VEC/DACs for video output
Dual video decoders

Improved Audio support
SACD and DVD-Audio disc support
WMA-Pro and MP3

Improved Networking support
Fast Ethernet
HDi and Navigator support.

Improved Storage/Memory
Dual SATA support
Dual DDR2 Memory interface
Dual USB ports

Dual MIPS processors power the whole shebang.
I imagine that it would take 3 or more seperate chips
to offer the functionality that is capable with this single
piece of silicon. Less material equals less work and a lower Bill
of Materials. Look for more vendors to hop into the market next
year with products based on this and the NEC chips. It should be
possible to make a Universal Blu-ray/HD DVD player as well. All the
bases are covered here.

This stuff isn't exciting to most people but now that Broadcom has announced this chipset we have an idea about where the market is going. And it looks and sounds great.