The processor in the TiVo Premiere is over twice as fast as the Series3
By Ben Drawbaugh 
posted March 9th 2010 5:49PM
posted March 9th 2010 5:49PM
posted March 9th 2010 5:49PM
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How come my motorola DCX sucks so bad if it's processor is the same at the TiVo?
@arbeck77 I think they use the same guide on all Moto boxes (at least Comcast does) so it needs to be "usable" on slower Moto boxes as well.
Wait... the TiVo HD is less powerful than the Series 3? Thats too bad. Im surprised by how small of a jump in power it is from the Series 2 to the Series 3, and surprised that the TiVo HD was sold at a loss in this day in age.
@shorties
I'm not. Their strategy is to recoup the cost of the box with your subscription, just like cell phones. Microsoft never made a profit on sales of the original Xbox and I believe the same was true at least initially with the Xbox 360; same with Sony and the PS3. Of course companies like Microsoft and Sony can afford to do that by increasing their profit margin on products in other parts of their business (software and TVs, respectively).
I was going to say the same thing, but Cable MSO's just don't seem to be ready to deploy in house HD guides. I guess they are still not ready for prime time. Not to mention the additional marketing and support costs to cover the standard guide and the HD improved DVR guide. It's on the way, Comcast tells me that. They know that the experience is less than ideal. I think this year they are deploying as many as these DCX boxes as possible, and sometime in 2011, hopefully we will see a much more modern interface as seen here during Engadget's 2008 CES coverage.
Am I wrong in feeling like my high-definition DVR ought to have a faster processor than my phone?
@weekfiction No, I'm right there with you. I guess if you think about what the cable boxes need to do, there's really not much there. My computer's PVR software can stream live TV, transcode to almost any format and do PiP though, so it makes sense that my computer is as fast as it is. My phone can also receive that live TV, play games, watch YouTube, surf the web, etc., so I can see it being fairly powerful as well. But Wow, I never thought DVRs were clocked that slowly.
-Brian
@weekfiction I was initially thinking that myself -- though one thing is that the CPU on the DVR box is only for handling the GUI as well as things like season pass priority management, etc. The real processor intensive tasks are handled by dedicated hardware. In your iPhone, you really have a general purpose computer which needs to handle real tasks. Still, I see no reason why the DVRs don't have more powerful CPUs even for something like managing what they do need to do.
By itself, new hardware does little to improve the experience for the user. New hardware needs new software to take advantage of it.
The latest cable company DVRs from Motorola and Samsung feature newer, faster DVR CPUs, but they still run the same old software; no changes were made to leverage the improved performance.
Creating new software for an embedded platform takes time, but it is also a question of priorities; the vast majority of cable and satellite subscribers still have older DVRs. When 90-95% of customers still have the older, slower boxes, it can be difficult to justify substantial investment in new software for the 5-10% of boxes that can actually run it.
I also forgot to mention, can't believe how low the u-verse dvr is on that list. That has a really nice interface along with PIP, multiroom and all that cool stuff.
@cypherx
Since this is embedded hardware you don't always need raw processing power to implement cool features. Decoding H.264 1080p video is a perfect example.
@BenD - sorry wrong. H.264 takes more CPU than MPEG. Also, this article is a little off.. Most STB processors are multi core CPUs Is hard to test thruput. They're going on marketing data of the central core... which may not even account for the graphics GPU
@SuwaneeM3
Wrong about what? I didn't say anything about MPEG. I said that a purpose built chip could decode H.264 1080p even if it didn't have a lot of raw processing power.
@cypherx
The CPU isn't the only factor in system performance. There's also memory bandwidth, bus bandwidth, 2D and 3D performance, and I/O. Memory and system bandwidth were bottlenecks on older DVRs,
The U-Verse DVR benefits from the fact that it has no tuners to consume system resources. As an IPTV box, it is more of a media streamer device. The HD streams from the AT&T gateway are only 5-6Mbps, which keep I/O requirements to a minimum.
As mentioned by another poster, the DVRs at the top of the list are based on dual-core solutions. Some system operations will benefit from the multi-core support in Linux, but the DVR software must be rewritten with multi-threading for full benefit. It is unlikely that TiVo will take full advantage of both cores at launch, so performance optimization is likely something that will occur over time.
If you were to compare 2D performance, the rankings similar to those in the CPU chart. The 2D core generally runs at half the CPU frequency, but the newer SoCs are able to process twice as many pixels per clock.
If you were to compare 3D performance, then the chart would look quite different. Of the newer DVRs, only the TiVo Premiere, Moxi, and Dish ViP922 feature a GPU. I'm told this is the fastest GPU available in a Broadcom SoC as of late last year, but I haven't been able to obtain any performance numbers. Nor have I been able to confirm if or when this GPU will support Flash acceleration under Linux (Adobe added support for GPU acceleration in Flash 10.1).
LOL, love the phone comparison. some how that really sort of tells the full story.
@bushi
The only issue with the comparison is both the phone and the TiVo have dedicated hardware that is independent of their processor power that allow them to fulfill the tasks that they are expected to handle. So its not really a fair comparison, just a good way to get an idea of what kind of processing we are dealing with.
Iptv is actually harder to do than QAM as you need a network stack in addition as well as high abilities in error correction for packet loss. H264 also takes more CPU as it is tightly packed and requires more steps to decompress and requires dynamic frame memory. What is the most notible performance loss is from supporting OCAP and java. Horrible idea
@SuwaneeM3 See bkdtv's post above. While in theory h.264 decode takes more CPU, since this is built into the support chips the main differences are memory bandwidth and such and given that the AT&T h.264/VC-1 samples are half or less the bandwidth of the MPEG-2 streams that typical cable boxes use, they still come out ahead...
Since they have redone the entire user interface in Flash on the Premier, the processor speeds aren't really comparable. It may well be that the new UI is actually SLOWER than the UI on the existing Tivo Series 3 or HD boxes. We'll have to see. The existing demos don't look too impressive, regardless of the MIPS improvement of the CPU.