Zune HD confirmed to use Nvidia Tegra chip

[Daniel ~]

Written by Daniel
Wednesday, 17 June 2009

There has been quite an amount of buzz surrounding the Zune HD in recent months. Although Microsoft has already confirmed the device’s existence and some of its features,

by Jose Vilches on June 17, 2009, 11:16 AM
Tech Spot

many were left wondering exactly what would power all that promised high-def goodness. [Front page...]

[Áedán]

nVidia's Tegra looks pretty neat to be honest. I was looking at the specs of the various different chips in the line, and they look really good for devices like media players and mobile phones.

The Tegra APX 2500 (The low end Tegra) is a 600MHz ARM11 core, with an integrated graphics controller (854x480) capable of 720p resolution @30fps, with HDMI 1.3, SXGA, S-Video and composite support. It also has an HDAVP (High Definition Audio Video Processor), which is basically hardware assist. It handles H264 baseline, VC1/WMv9, D1 MPEG-4 and JPEG. Unsurprisingly it also supports formats like AAC, AMR, WMA and MP3.

It has an onchip GPU, but no idea what the specs are like. It does manage dual display and OpenGL ES 2.0 though. There's also support for a camera, up to 12Mpix, but I doubt the Zune HD will use that.

The APX 2500 has a bunch of interfaces, including USB 2 OTG and others. That makes it's pretty easy to handle WiFi, Bluetooth and similar directly.

That's just the low end of the Tegra range! At least now I know why the Zune HD can't manage resolutions above 720p. Only the Tegra 650 chip can manage the 1080p resolution.

[Áedán]

The Tegra 650 might make a nice netbook or HDTV frontend actually. Just have to wait for some devices to start using it!