ARM Community: What to expect from Smart TVs at CES 2013 - ARM Community

As the industry prepares for 2013, CES will open the box on the next features we should expect to see appearing in our living rooms over the next 2 years. Throughout 2012 we have seen the smartTV market establish itself, transforming from something for early technology adopters to appearing in a wide number of homes. And we expect the smartTV market to continue growing over the coming years.

So what do we expect the smartTVs that you’ll see at CES this year to focus on?

The smartTVs that we have seen coming out over the last year have focused on how having a networked TV can bring you access to more content while opening up your social media world to the largest screen in your house. We expect this to continue with a larger range of content choices available, as well as enabling gaming and other applications to run natively on your TV without the need of a console or a set-top-box. This feature level is being enabled by the increasing underlying SoC performance with the pairing of the ARM® Cortex™-A9 and Mali™-400, a common combination found in smartphones today. The performance level enabled by this combination opens up a wider range of features that can be enabled on the smartTV. We expect this to be enhanced further in 2013 with the launches of Cortex-A15 with Mali-T604 based TVs.

We expect CES to be full of 4k2k resolution screens – the increase in resolution enables a more realistic user experience through enhanced visuals, improved user interfaces and more immersive gaming. The increase in resolution requires a greater level of performance offered by the underlying hardware because of the four time resolution increase. We expect this to be one of the key drivers for the offering for the higher performance Cortex-A15/Mali-T604 combination.

The way that we interact with our consumer gadgets has transformed over recent years with the wider adoption of touch screens, gesture- and voice-related interactions. Consumers are always looking for new ways to interact with their devices and smartTVs are no exception. We want easier ways to control the TV and easier interfaces that enable us to access content or social media channels. The remote control does not offer the most compelling experience, so we expect gesture and voice to become more standard. This will be built into standard opening-up services, such as the TV recognizing music being played and suggesting content that would complement it, the TV recognizing who is in the room and suggesting appropriate content for the audience, or providing restrictions on the content shown if younger members of the family are watching. These features require more graphics functionality and better perform through the use of GPU Compute. GPU Compute enables tasks that are parallelized to run more quickly and efficiently.

The smoothness of interactions with menus and applications vitally contributes to the user experience. Consumers want faster zooming, scrolling and browsing as well as video playback. More middleware and applications are being based on HTML5 with more legacy applications moving toward HTML5, which enables common services on various devices without having to do dedicated porting for each device. We see HTML5 becoming more of the de-facto standard and GPU functionality is key to enabling this.

With all of this new technology, smartTV will be easier, more fun and more integrated with our lives in the coming years.


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Kris Hong, Director of Home Segment Marketing, ARM, is based in Cambridge. Kris joined ARM in 2006 and prior worked for LSI Logic as an application engineer of consumer electronics. He has broad knowledge across consumer electronics and driving new technology in 3 to 5 years. He got MS, BS of electrical engineering at Yonsei University.