We live in exciting times. Broadcom has released the Crystal HD BCM70012 (official link), a Mini PCIe 1080p decoder. Since the Aleutia Fanless T1 PC has a mini PCI express card slot (which we often use for an 802.11n Intel adapter) you can upgrade that low power PC so that it can play back 1080p content without having to resort to the more expensive Nvidia Ion boards we use in the Aleutia H1 Fanless HTPC.
Even better, the BCM70012 is supported by Adobe Flash 10.1 (still in beta), just like the Ion chipset. Flash 10.1 is less processor intensive than 10.0 because it uses the GPU as well. That means that for £25 extra, an Aleutia Fanless T1 can play back YouTube in HD (now 1080p) something that my MacBook cannot do, as well as BBC’s iPlayer (720p).
Anandtech has a great article, highlighting the full linux support enjoyed by the Broadcom BCM70012 and XBMC’s (Xbox Media Centre) ability to utilize it, as well as Boxee.
Tags: broadcom BCM70012, CM70012
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So, for a person considering either an fanless single-core H1 or a fanless T1 with a Broadcom chip, the advantage of the T1 is obvious – lower price. What are the advantages of the H1?
The H1 has the SSD and more memory, but does the Ion chipset offer significant advantage over the 945GSE supplemented by the Broadcom hardware decoder? Is it able to play a wider variety of HD content?
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Well, the Ion has been around for longer and is less fiddly in terms of drivers, but the beauty of the Broadcom chip is it only uses 1W. So price and size are smaller and power consumption is better. We’re going to be working more on offering Ubuntu with Broadcom support out of the box but for now it is up to the customer.
The Intel X25-V SSDs we are using are much faster than the Kingston 64GB SSDNow in the H1 and we’ll probably standardize on this as Kingston keeps raising prices and does not have any stock in the UK (the biggest Kingston distributor currently has 1 in stock).
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