It's really not that hard to do HD video when you use a dedicated chip, cheap aiptek pocketcams have HD out for instance, if it's baked in a chip it's not a 'wow' thing, it's just an issue with the paltry atom CPU when it doesn't have a proper graphics core to use, but the actual technology is cheap and widely available. Hell I can even get a dvd 1080p upscaling dvd player for $40, it's off-the-shelf stuff.
It's not really that simple. Your example devices deal with very finite set of encoding formats allowing the use of FPGAs or ASICs. For a media player that you expect to be able to play any format you throw at it, hardware codecs won't work. The solution is to use a special purpose CPU that can perform software decoding at a lower CPI than a general purpose CPU. This is what the NVidia GPU and the TI DSP does.
The X-Fi3 keeps with the company's commitment to audio fidelity, thanks to the apt-X codec, which supposedly offers audio quality similar to a wired connection when streaming. On that front, the device also handles FLAC files.
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It's really not that hard to do HD video when you use a dedicated chip, cheap aiptek pocketcams have HD out for instance, if it's baked in a chip it's not a 'wow' thing, it's just an issue with the paltry atom CPU when it doesn't have a proper graphics core to use, but the actual technology is cheap and widely available.
Hell I can even get a dvd 1080p upscaling dvd player for $40, it's off-the-shelf stuff.
It's not really that simple. Your example devices deal with very finite set of encoding formats allowing the use of FPGAs or ASICs. For a media player that you expect to be able to play any format you throw at it, hardware codecs won't work. The solution is to use a special purpose CPU that can perform software decoding at a lower CPI than a general purpose CPU. This is what the NVidia GPU and the TI DSP does.