HD Processing Forum: Conference Report - Spring 2008 - "HD Driving PC & Digital Media: Global Market & Technology Trend," held in Taipei, Taiwan

HD Processing Forum: Conference Report - Spring 2008
"HD Driving PC & Digital Media: Global Market & Technology Trend," held in Taipei, Taiwan

HD Processing Forum held a conference, titled "HD Driving PC & Digital Media: Global Market & Technology Trend" at the Taiwan International Conference Center in Taipei, Taiwan on Wednesday, March 19, 2008.
The conference covered the latest HD trends in the market as well as in the technology, inviting practicing professionals from the relevant industry sectors including PC (both software and hardware) and digital media.
As Taiwan today is the most powerful center for development of PCs and digital consumer electronics devices, approximately 150 participants participated in this conference event. (Figure 1)

Japan as the Epicenter of HD Trends

First of all, Mr. Takano, President and CEO at TechnoAssociates, Inc., a marketing consulting firm in Tokyo, Japan, briefly explained the global HD market trends and pointed out that Japanese consumers are most demanding and advanced in terms of HD literacy. The fact that most HD-centric products, such as full-HD television sets, Blu-ray Disc recorders, or AVCHD camcorders, are developed in Japan is also a case in point.
Accordingly, Mr. Takano suggested that Taiwanese electronics companies might want to collaborate more with Japanese counterparts, given aforementioned reasons regarding the HD trends. (Figure 2)

HD Video Applications Available in Taiwan - MOD by Chunghwa Telecom

Secondly, Dr. Ching-ming Chen, Deputy Director of MOD Division at Chunghwa Telecom (CHT) in Taiwan, described the HD video content applications currently available today in Taiwan, from technological point of view.
Exemplifying CHT's Fiber-based multimedia-on-demand (or MOD) services, Dr. Chen delved into the details of IPTV or high-definition television (HDTV) technologies.
Dr. Chen lectured on elemental technologies in IPTV/HPTV including fiber-to-the-building (or FTTB), HDTV specifications, and HD compression used in IPTV, with human visual characteristics, all of which contribute to the HDTV services currently available today.
Regarding FTTB, Dr. Chen explained that the access network has been evolving from ADSL with some Mbps bandwidth to VDSL to eventually FTTB with 25 Mbps or faster. He pointed out that "25 is the magic number."
He then went through HD fundamentals with key specifications and figures. Since HD is yet to become fully popular in the global market, his explanations on HDTV basics and specifications must be informative and helpful for those who are getting into this field of technology.
Another intriguing topic was the visual characteristics of human, which was taken advantage of in video compression approach. Dr. Chen's lecture on visual redundancy was eye-opening and informative since most engineers take video compression technology for granted. Understanding human visual redundancy helps engineers comprehend how and why the motion compensated prediction technique saves bits.
Lastly, the video compression, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, used in IPTV/HDTV was covered. Again, these pieces of information are essential and very important to keep in mind for all practicing engineers in charge of HD-centric products. (Figure 3)

SpursEngine: Stream Processor Accelerating HD

Following Dr. Chen, Mr. Masubuchi, Director at Advanced SoC Development Center of Toshiba Semiconductor Company, presented their recent stream processor product targeted for HD processing applications.
Mr. Masubuchi's presentation about SpursEngine covered the chip's concept, video clips of application demos, and future plans.
He mentioned the SpursEngine chip was derived from the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor used in Sony's latest game console, PlayStation 3. He emphasized that SpursEngine inherits the Cell/B.E.'s DNA and supports "a comfortable digital life for the full-HD generation."
SpursEngine has synergistic processor elements (or SPEs), which the processor inherited from Cell/B.E., and achieves flexible software solutions for a variety of systems for stream media, recognition, graphics and other high-performance computing applications. At the same time, for fixed media processing such as MPEG-2 and H.254, SpursEngine has on-chip hardware codec logic for each, resulting in lower power consumption compared with all-software implementations.
To illustrate the SpursEngine's performance and capability, Mr. Masubuchi showed a couple of demo video clips featuring what they call FACEMATION, a 3D graphics application with real-time face tracking and graphic rendering, and Face Navigation, a video indexing application with automatic image recognition and thumbnail creation for exciting video scenes.
Mr. Masubuchi summarized his presentation with future plans by mentioning SpursEngine II, with even better power-to-performance ratio, a few years later in their roadmap.
Furthermore. Mr. Hamaoka, a Toshiba application engineer, complemented Mr. Masubuchi's presentation by briefly introducing SpursEngine Reference Kit, or SRK, with sample program code included in the kit. SRK is expected to be available from Toshiba in the second quarter this year. (Figure 4)

LCD (Flat-panel) TV to become the HD Device Center

After a short break with demo exhibition at the venue, Mr. Charles Chou, Senior Industry Analyst at Market Intelligence Center, Institute for Information Industry, lectured the market trend on HD-capable digital media equipment.
In his presentation overview, Mr. Chou defined the "HD World" that consists of nine major electronic device segments: desktop PC; digital camcorder; digital still camera; DVD player & recorder; set-top box; game console; LCD monitor; LCD TV; and notebook PC.Given the "HD world" definition, he further showcased very detailed statistical figures for aforementioned device segments and emphasized the attractiveness of HD or full-HD devices.
Mr.Chou then mentioned about the market trend and issues for each device segment with full of meticulous marketing data. Although the market trend can be somewhat different from one segment to another, Mr. Chou's market data demonstrated that the consumer electronics market in general is heading towards HD.
Concluding his presentation, Mr. Chou argued that LCD TV would become the device center and drive the HD trend in the consumer electronics market.
His final slide was suggestive by asking the audience what is next, after LCD TV. (Figure 5)

Full-HD Requires Too Much Computing Power

The last presentator during this conference was Mr. Rack Liu, Senior Special Assistant to President at Leadtek Research Inc. Leadtek is a PC peripheral manufacturer, and Mr. Liu gave a presentation about HD processing on PC platform from a hardware company's point of view.
Mr. Liu's presentation covered a variety of technological topics including CPU, GPU, chipset, memory, SATA/HDD, PCI Express, and Flash memory, with HD processing in mind.
While he went through the PC technology details and evolution of CPUs or GPUs, he eventually pointed out that the current PC architecture is not sufficient to process full-HD decode and encode tasks but additional processing scheme such as Toshiba's SpursEngine is required.
For those who design or develop PC system hardware, Mr. Liu's illustration on full-HD decode and encode with PowerPoint animation was easy-to-understand and informative to review how HD processing is performed within a PC. (Figure 6)

Panel Discussion: "HD Technology and Market Trend"

Following the four presentations was a panel discussion with all speakers (except for Chunghwa Telecom's Dr. Chen) plus two PC application vendors, Corel and Cyberlink.
Mr. Takano of TechnoAssociates took the lectern again and complemented his opening remark with another brief presentation before the actual discussion.
Following his brief presentation, Mr. Takano moderated the entire panel discussion throughout this session. (Figure 7)

Asked about the market trend and product plan, Dr. Wen-Chien Liu of Corel Taiwan emphasized the importance of HD processing, particularly around AVCHD or MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, in video editing applications and showcased their DVD MovieFactory demonstration, featuring high-speed codec thanks to SpursEngine. (The demo PC was equipped with a SpursEngine evaluation board.) Corel's demonstration illustrated that HD video rendering process can be accelerated by an order of magnitude with SpursEngine, compared with an ordinary PC platform with software codec.

Meanwhile, another PC application software vendor CyberLink Corp. mentioned other possibilities with SpursEngine. Asked about the company's product plan around HD processing, Dr. Jet Huang, Director of Core Technology Dept., R&D Division at CyberLink, mentioned the recognition is one of key aspects in HD processing. Dr. Huang listed a few software products, MagicSports, MagicDirector, and PowerDirector, as the ones that the company is planning to offer with SpursEngine acceleration. Although Dr. Huang did not give a live demonstration during the session, CyberLink dispatched two application engineers and set up a table-top demonstration with PowerDirector powered by SpursEngine. According to Claire Chang, a Specialist at CyberLink, the video rendering, powered by SpursEngine, is at least as five times as fast as that on an ordinary PC. (CyberLink's demo PC was also equipped with a SpursEngine evaluation board.)

Conclusion: Low-cost and High-Performance is key in HD Popularization

After the conference, HD Processing Forum compiled and summarized the participant survey. Among about 150 participants, 98 survey forms were collected at the end of the conference.
Many participants were interested in the market trends as well as the enabling device technology for HD. The best presentation was Mr. Masubuchi's talk on SpursEngine.
As was mentioned in Mr. Chou's presentation, many participants believe that digital TV and next generation DVD is the dominant driving application in HD popularization followed by game consoles, HD camcorders, and video sharing on the Internet.
About the condition as to what is needed to spread HD video on the PC, more than 70 percent of participants believe lower price HD equipment is most important. In a similar survey conducted in Japan during the first event, we obtained a similar result, which is significant. Meanwhile, HD video codec or recognition imposes quite high processing performance on the system. Therefore, a candidate for the ideal solution would be a hybrid system that consists of a conventional PC platform and a dedicated media processor for optimum cost-performance.