No, it’s not a joke, but it’s not hands-down proof that Microsoft will allow it either. The Tegra platform is fully capable of 1080p playback (as you’ll hear after the jump roughly two minutes into the video), and the Zune HD has already been outed as being built on the Tegra platform. Now, with this in mind, there are still a few things holding Microsoft back from enabling 1080p video playback on Tegra: The Zune HD likely won’t have the hard drive space to store more than a few movies in full 1080p resolution, nor is there much of a point in squandering space on a 1080p film and playing it back on a reduced screen. Storing 720p and scaling it down for playback on a smaller screen while on the move makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense to do this with massive 1080p video, especially when there isn’t even much of a perceived difference in quality when outputting both 720p and 1080p to a TV. Keep in mind as well that while Tegra’s power usage is awesomely low, playing 1080p video is still more energy-expensive than playing 720p, so 1080p will also reduce battery life. The benefits v. drawbacks aren’t in favor of 1080p, but at least it’s comforting to know that the ZuneHD is capable.
The reason this matters, though, is that for those enthusiasts out there who want the capability to throw 1080p at their TVs from their Zunes, this may be nothing more than a quick hackjob to enable. If Microsoft decides to produce a high-capacity model down the road (say, 320GB), I also wouldn’t be surprised to see it officially enabled on the Zune HD by default.
As for the Tegra platform, I managed to run into two separate Tegra netbooks, one of which was throwing 720p video at a TV without any problems. Tegra itself is ridiculously tiny, and NVIDIA seems to be working quite hard to get deals with car manufacturers, smartphone makers, netbook makers, TV makers, etc. for the Tegra platform. The goal, basically, is to get Tegra embedded into anything in which it might possibly fit, which is to say, basically everything. Power usage is also amazingly low, which opens the gates for many applications.
Update: I’ve checked the specs for the two different Tegra Systems-on-Chip, and neither state support for 1080p. However, there’s clear confirmation in the video that at least one of the Tegra models is 1080p-capable, so who knows. Thanks goes to @clubdirthill for sparking a desire within me to look into the matter.
More details on everything (including the size) can be found in my video of NVIDIA’s Tegra platform, which happens to be below the fold in both vanilla and HD YouTube form.
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1080p is nice, but Tegra is essentially old technology. Its an ARM11 derivative, instead of building off the ARM Cortex architecture, which adds vector extensions, hardware-accelerated Java (with a license from Sun and ARM), and an enhanced version of the Thumb instruction set (which allows very high code density by using 16-bit instructions.) Cortex also tends to get far better performance per cycle in most benchmarks than ARM11, and some have been clocked up to 1.5GHz. The fastest Tegra runs at 750MHz. A Freescale MX51 or Qualcomm Snapdragon should blow Tegra away for general computing; the only thing it has going for it is 1080p decoding in hardware.
What does power usage look like on the Cortex?
I don’t under their low capacity policy. With the age of SSDs, why can’t we go to 120 GB as the baseline model?
With a TI OMAP3, the more common of the two major Cortex implementations, its extremely low. I don’t have the datasheet in front of me, but even when doing something like video encoding it shouldn’t exceed 500mW. I can’t speak for the Qualcomm Snapdragon, the faster of the two, since I’ve never actually used one.
I’ll check the datasheet on the OMAP once I get home and get some exact numbers.
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@anonymous, they can’t use a 120GB HDD because HDD’s can’t be used with the touchscreen. 120GB SSD would be extremely expensive…. more than anyone would be willing to pay.
Regardless of which platform is superior, the fact that these platforms exist, and what they can do, is simply astounding. It’s pretty hard to believe that laptops were nowhere near mainstream 20 years ago, and now we have systems with mobos smaller than a business card running full HD (which also didn’t exist in 1989) for near a day!
So was it ever confirmed that the Zune HD will be a hard-drive based device? I rememeber hearing rumors that it could be flash-based, but I think HDD makes a bit more sense.
The ZuneHD is flash based. It is believed that they went with flash to make it smaller AND because of the accelerameters and such. Being flash-based is just a bit more stable.
While there are only drawbacks to using 1080p on the device as a portable media player, I think there should still be an option to load 1080p files onto the device in order to view them in their full glory on your big screen instead of upscaling a downscaled video.