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BRIAN SANTO
To run interactive TV, you need power. Pioneer says its new set-top box, with a single-chip design, provides all the muscle the industry's been seeking.
Cast your mind back six or seven years ago. Gerald Levin, chairman of Time Warner, got on a stage to introduce the Full Service Network and played video games with a family ensconced in their home in Orlando, Fla. Levin was proudly ushering in the Age of Interactivity.
Except for that one hitch - the home terminal Time Warner used was essentially an engineering workstation which cost around $10,000, give or take. That was OK if you were going to use the thing to model molecules but was a little pricey for a set-top box.
Since then, set-tops have never quite lived up to that workstation. Also, semiconductor manufacturers have been diligently integrating generation after generation of circuitry, and they can now just about fit most of the performance represented in that 1993 workstation into a single chip inexpensive enough to put in a 2000 set-top box.
Exhibit A is Pioneer's Voyager 3000, introduced last week at the Western Cable Show. Broadcom integrated seven of the ICs in Pioneer's current box, the Voyager 1000 (which the 3000 is to eventually replace), into a single chip, which Broadcom has designated as the 7100. The 3000 is naturally more compact - 33% smaller, Pioneer says.
It is also more powerful. The single-chip solution includes a main processing unit rated at 85 MIPS, integrated with a graphics processing unit also rated at 85 MIPS.
Haig Krakirain, Pioneer's VP-software engineering says, "Eighty percent of the processor's time is spent with graphics rendering."
Devoting circuitry directly to graphics should allow the main processor to remain dedicated to running any applications, such as, Web browsing.
"The end result is that the apps run much faster," Krakirain says.
He says the Voyager 3000 will be the first box with a graphics co-processor.
Most of today's set-top boxes contain about 2 megabytes of DRAM. The Voyager 3000 will come standard with 16 MB of DRAM, expandable to 32 MB, for storing downloaded applications.
In acknowledgment of how MPEG video can consume the system resources of many STBs, the Voyager 3000 will reserve 2 MB of the total specifically for decoding MPEG 2.
In the past, Krakirain explains, the available memory was shared, "so if you were tuned to a digital channel, the box used the memory to decode the MPEG stream, eating away from the application's resources."
The generous amount of DRAM should also relieve viewers from ever having to manage their applications, in contrast to PC users, who are accustomed to having to close applications if they've opened too many, Krakirain explains.
"It's a marriage of your computer with your TV, and you don't want to introduce all the headaches you might have by managing that," he says.
The Voyager 3000 also will contain 8 MB of flash memory, for storing the box's core operating system, and the Passport 3.0 digital software suite (for operators who choose to use it).
Between the DRAM and the flash, the Voyager 3000 will be fully upgradable.
The Voyager 3000, he says, is "cheaper, faster, smaller, better. We are competitive for quality and price point and can meet market demand. We can deliver in high-volumes."
The Voyager is in alpha testing. Pioneer expects to go into beta testing early next year and begin volume manufacturing by April.
Pioneer does not have exclusive rights to the Broadcom 7100 series chips, but it says it will definitely get to market first with a box based on the chip.
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