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Start-up's chip design could improve mobile TV

Tom Krazit Former Staff writer, CNET News
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Google, as the most prominent company on the Internet defends its search juggernaut while expanding into nearly anything it thinks possible. He has previously written about Apple, the traditional PC industry, and chip companies. E-mail Tom.
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Tom Krazit

Mobile television is a hot topic these days, as wireless carriers and phone designers try to figure out how to get people to watch "24" and other programs on their phones. A company called Rapport unveiled a chip design at the Embedded Systems Conference Tuesday that could improve the performance of video streamed to handsets.

Rapport plans to develop a version of its current KC256 chip that contains more than 1,000 separate eight-bit processing elements. These work together at relatively low speeds to process high-definition video much faster than general purpose chips used in modern mobile phones. At the same time, Rapport has figured out how to keep the power consumption down to make sure a phone's battery doesn't run down before Jack Bauer saves the day, or at least the hour.

The Kilocore1025 will use one of IBM's PowerPC cores as part of the design, and IBM will manufacture the chip. However, Rapport has a long way to go before the Kilocore1025 is crunching video on a phone, as the company did not announce a manufacturing time line or any customers for the chip. Many companies develop plans for advanced chip designs that eventually get built into general-purpose processors through licensing deals or acquisitions.