Samsung Announces New Processors for Digital Picture Frames
Written on Dec 15, 2008 by Brian and filed under News, Samsung
Samsung has announced a new series of media processors designed specifically for the digital photo frame market. The S5L2010 series of processors are designed to give frames more power, specifically in the multi-media department, where almost all of them struggle mightily.
Samsung’s throwing out some impressive stats around the S5L2010. For instance, they claim it can decode a 57 megapixel JPEG image in just one second. This is definitely fast and while most of the market will never attempt to load humongous files like those, it’s probably fair to assume that it can process scaled down pictures really fast as well.
The more important enhancements are around multimedia though, where frames are severely hampered now. A lot of digital frames claim video playback capability, then you find out that it’s only at slow framerates and tiny resolutions. Even worse, most media plays poorly off of external storage like USB drives or memory cards and many frames don’t have enough internal memory to store large video files. Samsung’s new processor though has the capability to quickly decode video and audio in a several formats including: MPEG-1/2/4, Xvid, Motion JPEG, MP3, WMA, OGG and AAC.
The processors also integrates additional infrastructure features like support for touch screen control, SLC/ MLC NAND booting, built-in RTC, a LED PWM driver for the LCD backlight, an audio PWM 2 channel output, TV-Out, and DVB-T interface. Integrating support for all of these features within the processor reduces manufacturing costs and time to market.
The chip itself is built on an ARM9 core and features a SoC chip with a display controller that can support either analog or digital LCDs up to XGA resolution (1024×768). Having a dedicated-function chip for the digital frame market shows signs of maturity in a market where products have largely been cobbled together by parts designed to do something else, leading to serious problems like fires.
The S5L2010 media processors are sampling to manufacturers now and will be shown off at CES in January. Since Samsung also makes digital frames, it’s likely we’ll see them refresh their lineup with this new processor.Samsung expects mass production to start in the first quarter next year.
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