Nixeus Fusion XS Preview
Our friends at Anandtech recently posted a preview of the Nixeus Fusion XL. I’m not usually one to get too excited about a launch preview put together with an engineering sample, but this time was a bit different. The Nixeus Fusion XL is the first product to bring together two of the more interesting stories to come out of this year’s CES for the media streamer market: Marvell committing to bring its SoC design chops to the market to compete with Realtek and Sigma Designs and the push to use Android as the OS for media streamers.
Together or alone, the introduction of Marvell and Android into the media streamer market is going to be disruptive. Realtek and Sigma Designs have had the market largely to themselves for awhile. Marvell may be better associated with providing processors for more “dumb” devices, but they have the industry relationships and the production capacity necessary to be an instant competitor in any SoC market. As to Android, the biggest challenge for many media streamer manufacturers has been building an OS that can present media in a format more engaging than a file browser, never mind tap into an app ecosystem such as that offered by the Android Marketplace. Utilizing Android will not guarantee a great UI, but it might help provide the head start on the plumbing that some manufacturers need. It may be too early to tell if the Nixeus Fusion XL will be a great product, but it is already a bellwether product.
The video decoder in the 88DE3010 supports simultaneous decoding of two HD streams in MPEG-2, H.264 (AVC), VC-1, MPEG4 (DivX), VP6 SD and WMV9 formats. Audio decoding in the 88DE3010 is carried out on a dedicated audio DSP core, and support is provided for decoding of the popular audio formats (including Dolby, DTS, MP3, AAC, eAAC+, etc) along with audio post processing.