Comments on: Zune HD technically supports 1080p via Tegra [video]

By: Sam Johnson

Sam Johnson — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:23:43 +0000

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.

By: Cory

Cory — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:22:23 +0000

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.

By: Devin

Devin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:12:48 +0000

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.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:54:03 +0000

@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.

By: Zune HD to support 1080p via Tegra

Zune HD to support 1080p via Tegra — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:54:12 +0000

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By: Rhys

Rhys — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:17:47 +0000

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.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:52:13 +0000

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?

By: Bryant

Bryant — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:52:43 +0000

What does power usage look like on the Cortex?

By: Rhys

Rhys — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:32:06 +0000

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.