Intel bringing HD video to netbooks

 

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By David Fearon

Posted on 5 Feb 2009 at 11:29

Intel has developed a graphics acceleration device for netbook processors and chipsets.

The device is currently being called an SIMD Accelerator and was revealed by Intel fellow Krishnamurthy Soumyanath in a talk prior to the International Solid State Circuits Conference, which starts this week.

SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) is the set of extra instructions and processor circuitry introduced with MMX back in 1997, later becoming SSE (streaming SIMD extensions).

Current Atom processors don't have any SIMD capability - Soumyanath explained this is because the circuitry doesn't scale down to the ultra-low power and voltages required in Atom processors.

The new SIMD Accelerator will work all the way down to a tiny 0.23V, and is claimed to be up to 80 times more energy-efficient than existing designs.

SIMD is used when the same operation needs to be applied on several chunks of data. One of the main uses is image and video processing - it can accelerate video decoding, for instance, by decoding several pixels simultaneously.

In theory that should make netbooks and other devices better able to cope with the likes of HD video, although Soumyanath gave no explicit promises beyond promising "great SIMD performance".