Western Digital WDTV Live Hub Review

A couple of weeks back, I had the opportunity to visit the Sigma Designs office at Milpitas for a demonstration session. The main purpose of the visit was to understand Sigma's home convergence strategy, and in particular, how their powerline networking products fit into the puzzle. I had a very informative discussion with Keith Jack (Sr. Dir. of Product Marketing, Sigma Designs) and Michael Weissman (VP, Corporate Marketing, Sigma Designs). But, surely, powerline networking has nothing to do with the WDTV Live Hub? If that is your line of thinking, you are partially right. The powerline networking strategy is indeed a story for another day. In this section, I will cover the media processing solutions that Sigma Designs had on display.

The first demo I saw after our initial talk was that of a development board decoding 3D video onto a 3D TV. Excitedly, I peeked into the board, expecting to see the new SMP 8646 in action. However, I was surprised to see that it was the SMP 8654 on it. Upon inquiry, I found that a recent SDK had enabled decode of certain 3D formats with that chip (similar to how PS3's HDMI 1.3 port was 'fimrware upgraded' to partially support HDMI 1.4). Realizing that it was the same chip that powered the WDTV Live Plus, I was left wondering when a firmware update with the new SDK would reach the WDTV Live Plus owners.

Before moving on to the teardown section, I will wrap up this small section with what we can look forward to from Sigma Designs in the next year or so. A couple of years back, Sigma Designs bought video processing semiconductor firm Gennum. The IP from that company led to the VXP line of products, a part of many high end video processors. I saw a demo of the latest VXP chip in action, and the results looked really impressive. Keith indicated that the VXP IP would be eventually integrated with their decoder IP to yield a single chip decoder / video processing solution. In light of the demo, such a product has the ability to redefine picture quality on media streamers. It is a well known fact that Sigma Designs is one of the licensees for ImgTec's PowerVR GPU IP. Their latest chip integrates the PowerVR SGX 535, and an OpenGL demo (with 1080p video being decoded in the background) was on display. Eye candy user interfaces are sure to receive a face lift when given access to the powerful graphics capabilities of the PowerVR GPU.

By the time I decided to open up the Live Hub, it was quite obvious that the Live Hub was powered by the SMP 8654. The only remaining part of the puzzle was the GbE port.