Broadcom Crystal HD video acceleration on Intel’s new Atom platform

At CES, you are going to see an avalanche of new Netbooks with the new Atom platform that Intel launched yesterday. Some will have fan-less designs, and many will use the Crystal HD chip from Broadcom that accelerates 1080p video decode. The photo above shows the chip in action – look at the CPU bar on the left (with Crystal HD). It’s not clear how good it will be with Flash, but it should help. Note that unlike Nvidia’s Ion, there’s no 3D graphics, which might or might not be an issue. Hopefully, this will become the baseline in terms of graphics performance until Intel updates its integrated graphics to reach that level. Link to the full video.