ARM Community: 2012: It's all about SmartTV, SmartTV and SmartTV - ARM Community

If you attended CES this year you must have noticed that it was all about Smart TV and even if you didn’t attend you must have heard or read about it everywhere. Yes, the Smart TV has finally arrived.

Quoting the late Steve Jobs in his memorable speech at Stanford University “you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards”, at CES this year it was clear to me how the dots connect to the Smart TV. It all started when TVs went digital. Then the race to HD and 3D pushed the resolutions and highlighted the need to increase the computing capabilities. Bringing Internet connectivity at last year’s CES was a major step but it wasn’t until full application processors made their way into the TV that it has finally become “smart”. This year at CES the Smart TV was everywhere.

So what is making the new application processors so special that the Smart TVs they enable took over the show? Processors made their way into TVs a while back but the main difference with the application processors inside ARM Powered^® Smart TVs is that they have the powerful ARM Cortex™-A9 processor combined with the stunning ARM Mali™-400 MP graphics processor.

So who were the Smart TV stars of CES 2012?



Well undoubtedly the LG 55EM9600 OLED CINEMA 3D SMART TV was a massive hit. And it is not a surprise that it was the cnet Best of Show 2012 Award winner. The fabulous 55” OLED screen is of course an amazing asset as well as the elegant design but again behind the scenes there’s the combination of the Cortex-A9 processor and Mali-400 MP GPU.

This allows the TV to have an awe-inspiring user interface with 3D transition effects that can be controlled by gesture, thanks to embedded gesture recognition and the motion control Magic Remote shipped with it.

Gesture recognition will allow a totally different and amazing user experience on Smart TVs. Talking to Virgile Delporte, VP of Marketing & Communication at SoftKinetic™, a leading provider of gesture recognition middleware and cameras and sensors, he said “We strongly believe that natural interaction with the Smart TV will profoundly change the way we interact with this smart device. The performance of ARM Powered Smart TVs, combining Cortex processors and Mali GPUs, are amazing. It’s now possible to run full body tracking and analysis together with high-end apps and games.” Watch out for Virgile’s guest blog on the ARM Multimedia Community pages later this week.

But what is truly amazing is that the LG Smart TV is capable of running the latest games in the mobile space with a console-like experience on a large screen. This was demonstrated by LG and ARM gaming partner Unity, a top 3 game engine provider, with the jaw-dropping game Shadowgun developed by Madfinger. LG and Unity are partnering to bring Unity’s Union catalogue of games on the 55EM9600 SmartTV. Oren Tversky, VP Union at Unity told me that we are at an exciting turning point in the gaming industry; Unity developers can now bring all the amazing games they are creating natively to the TV without requiring a console. With Union, Unity is building a strong catalogue of games ready for Smart TV. The way this works is simple: developers create stunning games; Unity’s Union takes care of porting them to different platforms and publishing them on their behalf.

The emergence of Chinese Smart TVs was also strong at CES. HiSense and Skyworth showed their latest Smart TVs which are both based on the AmLogic AML8726-M application processor that is also powered by a Cortex-A9 processor and Mali-400 MP GPU. Both Smart TVs were running Android™ and demonstrated mobile games running natively on them.



Another companion to the TV also got smarter at CES - the Set-top-box. Geniatech was showing an AmLogic powered Set-top-box running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

NDS and ARM joined hands to port NDS’s latest EPG solution Snowflake on Geniatech. Snowflake was ported also to the Unity3D game engine. Talking to my friend Thierry Gruszka, Director of Partnerships & Investigation - New Initiatives at NDS, he commented that with the amazing combination of ARM Cortex-A9 CPU and Mali-400 GPU, NDS were able to finally port Snowflake to Unity, leveraging the work ARM and Unity have done already to optimize the Unity engine. NDS engineers enjoyed adding the fancy and nice 3D transition effects they've always wanted to embed in the NDS family of TV and set-top-box user interfaces.



STMicroelectronics were also demonstrating at their suite their latest all ARM processor-based Orly platforms for set-top box and announced its brother Newman for TV. We at ARM worked with STM to showcase the amazing graphics capabilities of Orly by porting our cool 3D space racer game demo TrueForce to Orly. It was running in 1080p resolution at a constant 60 FPS.

Another hit at CES was the exciting Cotton Candy by FXI, a USB and HDMI dongle powered by the Samsung Exynos 4210, the same application processor that powers the award winning Samsung Galaxy SII. Cotton Candy simply upgrades any HDMI enabled DTV to a Smart TV. It is provided with Android 4.0 and Ubuntu Linux. FXI demonstrated mobile games running on the dongle including the amazing TrueForce spacer racer game demo by ARM.

The Smart TV market has continued to grow over the last two years from concept to mass production. Now there is a wealth of Smart TVs on the market, not only at the high end but throughout the wider market. The importance of the user experience is creating the demand for better interfaces, which in turn is driving the requirements for improved graphics support. Companies such as MStar, MediaTek, Skyworth, HiSense and TCL are all bringing their latest DTV designs to market, based on the Cortex-A9 processor paired with the Mali-400 MP GPU. This shows the benefits that key DTV manufacturers are seeing from market-leading Mali graphics technology.

Mali is now the leading graphics solution in the DTV space and the combination of Cortex-A9 and Mali-400 MP technologies is opening up the range of activities that can now benefit from the large screen, including web browsing, social networking interaction, and voice and gesture control enabling more exciting game play on a DTV without the need of dedicated gaming consoles.

Gartner commented in their latest DTV report: “ARM is a relative newcomer to the digital TV market. However, the company's Cortex-A9 and embedded Mali-400 MP GPU application processors are the de facto standard for all connected and smart TVs, as shown at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in January”.

This is just the beginning of the Smart TV era, or the Smart Living room experience era, where smart devices powered by ARM Cortex processors and Mali GPUs are enabling a smart and connected user experience. Stay tuned for more Smart living room news!

Nizar Romdan, Head of the Mali Ecosystem, ARM, Nizar has a good knowledge in graphics and has more than 5 years of expertise in managing developer tools. Nizar has joined ARM 4 years ago and prior to that worked for STMicroelectronics as engineering manager for the tools and modeling team of ST’s bus technology. Nizar holds a masters degree in microelectronics.