December 5, 2007

New Chip From Intel to Give a Large Boost to HD Streaming

It looks like Intel and MediaTek have gotten together and produced a new chipset to allow extremely fast HD wireless streaming. There has been lots of news lately about companies working on streaming HD signals so you don't need to run wires to your HDTV. One of the biggest problems with the HD craze that has swept the nation this past year is if you wanted to stream HD content from your PC to your TV via a media streamer lets say, there really isn't the necessary bandwidth available to do this streaming smoothly. Sure we now have 802.11N, and that is fine for 2007, but what happens in 2010 when file sizes start growing even larger then they are now. There needs to be a new way, a way without wires, to get all this data pushed around.

This isn't just for HDTV signals, it will apply to all sorts of media content that needs to be moved around. Imagine syncing your MP3 player with your 100GB music library in a few seconds. Well that is what this new chipset is hoping to achieve. Here is an impressive quote from the Engadget article we saw:

Apparently, the happy couple will both utilize their knowledge of millimeter wave (mmWave) radio technology in order to construct chipsets that allow end users to fling a 10GB file to its destination in just "five seconds" -- all without wires, of course.

We aren't sure when this will make it to consumers, but with claims like this, "and digital chipsets that enable at least 100 times higher data rates than current Wi-Fi standards", we can't wait till it hits. This will change the way we think about content. You also will no longer be tied to having your TV where your entertainment center is. If you can just pop your video wirelessly to the TV then you can put it anywhere and then all you'll need is a plug, or course until wireless energy is mainstream. :)

via engadget