It was only last week that Intel received the biggest fine
of its corporate life for violating EU antitrust laws in a case with AMD. Not
to mention, the other side of the picture rests in the fact that Nvidia has also been complaining
about Intel’s Atom pricing structure, and is probably still shaken by the anti-ION
propaganda in recent months.
With all backs turned against it, the blue chipmaker is now
turning to Broadcom for its HD video processing needs on the Atom “Pine Trail”
netbook platform that will be released in Q4. According to a few netbook
manufacturers, Intel plans to offer the Broadcom BCM70015 graphics chip as an
option to its partners on Pine Trail, which features support for popular codecs
such as AVC, H.264, VC-1, WMV9 and MPEG2. The other strong feature of this chip
is the fact that it can easily run Windows XP, Windows 7 and Linux at relatively low power.
The chip itself has a die area of 10mm² and consumes 30mW
when idling. When playing 720p HD content, it consumes a little under 500mW and
for 1080p HD content just under 1W. This is actually better than Nvidia’s
Tegra, which consumes 100mW when idling and around 2W when decoding at full
power.