While the companies behind the competing technologies of BluRay and HD would rather have customers be forced to choose one or the other, the truth is that consumers want a product that will do both. While there are rumors of some combo drives being made available at extraordinarily high price, starting next year, the old designs relied on incorporating both technologies into one unit Broadcom is seeking a good middle ground. They have introduced the first combo BluRay/HD chipset that will support both standards on the same chip. An improvement on their previous model, this one brings much needed hardware support for various standards:
Broadcom (Irvine, Calif.) originally introduced a high-definition (HD) audio/video decoder chip supporting both formats in January. But the company's latest device, BCM7440, integrates significantly more functionality, according to the company, including a pair of MIPS cores, a multi-stream HD video decoder, dedicated graphics engines, DSP-based audio processors, a security processor, DDR2 interfaces, integrated video and audio outputs and an array of system and network connectivity interfaces.
Broadcom is one of the few manufacturers producing chipsets for both BluRay and HD, and is the first manufacturer to develop a single chip that supports both.