ARM to supply processors, GPUs for LG TVs
updated 10:45 am EDT, Mon June 22, 2009
ARM chips coming to LG TVs
Known for its processors in portable electronics devices such as Mobile Internet Devices and smartphones, chipmaker ARM on Monday announced a partnership with LG that would have the latter integrate ARM products into its digital TVs. This includes both ARM's ARM11 MPCore multi-core processor, which offers LG the option to implement single or multiple SMP cores, as well as the ARM Mali-200 and Mali-400 MP graphics processors that should support both true 1080p resolutions and web browsing. Integrating these chips into the TVs obviates the need for a set-top box.
ARM suggests the additions should also be useful for two-way TV services like video-on-demand, voting and polling, games and shopping.
The ARM11 MPCore can contain between one and four processors for up to 1GHz processing speeds. The Mali-400 GPU brings multi-core graphics processing scalable from 300 megapixels to 1 gigapixel per second, while the Mali-200 GPU is more basic without shedding the feature set. These will offer between 4x and 16x full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA), 2D and 3D graphics processing and OpenGL ES 2.0 support.
There is no word on when the first ARM-equipped LG HDTVs will begin shipping or what they will cost.
