Sigma Designs unveils its latest SOC for Blu-ray players

Although you may not have heard of Sigma Designs, if you own any High-def gear, some it probably uses a Sigma chip for the heavy lifting. At CEATEC this week Sigma was showing off its SMP8644 SOC which promises to make the next generation of Blu-ray players load discs faster and perform better when rendering all that BD-J interactive content. And although it wasn't mentioned, we'd be willing to bet that the new chip can do all of this while at the same being cheaper then its older brothers.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 1st 2008 12:57AM]

wow this test board looks to be much smaller too. Hopefully we will see smaller sized players (closer to the size of the newer model dvd players on the market)

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 1st 2008 3:18AM]

You're ignoring the size of the drive.

Blu-ray boards have been that small for a while now. It's the drives and power supplies that make the machines so large.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 1st 2008 4:30AM]

Behold! the $100 blu ray player.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 1st 2008 10:29AM]

@ Ed.
It looks to be the same size as my internal DVD ROM, but those are not the ones used in current set top DVD players. For sake of argument, doesn't Sony make slim line drives for notebooks that could be used in these players (although I imaging those drives are much more costly)

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 1st 2008 1:22PM]

I am happy with the size of my Sony 350. They got smaller pretty fast imho.