Now Google is drawing a line in the sand!

Apple was the first on the video playback fight by denying video playback of flash based graphics. Now our friends at Google Have decided to pull support of H.264 encoded videos from their Chrome browser.

H.264 is used on Blue-ray discs and in many consumer based video products but has some issues that must be considered. Many Web standards advocates oppose using it because it is based on a patented video compression format that licenser's have to pay a royalty fee in able to use it. This closes the open format discussion that Apple is using as one of its arguments against Adobe Flash content.

Google is trying to push its own WebM Format to replace H.264. The technology behind the WebM project originated with On2 a company that Google purchased in August 2009. The VP8 codec doesn't have the patent and royalty issues and still provides comparable video quality in respect with H.264.

As this battle continues to heat up to be the winner of the codec war, the loser in reality is us!

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CES 2011-Another Focus is on Intel and AMD

The new focus is now on creating an integrated CPU/GPU chip to help speed up on board graphics and decrease energy usage. This will benefit Video consumption, and game play on machines that don't have add-on video cards. You can plan on seeing a decrease in pricing and better responsiveness in your applications as programmers take advantage of these products.

Intel is using this year's CES event to introduce their Sandybridge processor line. The first CPUs will ship very early in 2011 for both desktops and notebooks. The architecture discussion we have here today applies to both. The CPUs won’t be called Sandy Bridge but instead will be called Intel’s 2nd generation Core i3/i5/i7 microprocessors.
If you are interested in the detail of how this processor family works, take a look at this review from http://www.anandtech.com/print/3922.

AMD announced its new Fusion APU's (Accelerated Processor Units), and talks about the system integrators that will be putting systems and software to take full advantage of the APU's capabilities. Take a look at the AMD's site for more information. http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/software-hardware-ecosystem-fusion-2011jan04.aspx.

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Addendum: How could I forget NVidia in this group as well. With everyone focusing on the Tegra 2 processor that is earmarked for many of the Android/Honeycomb Tablets that are supposed to come out in the first and second quarter of this year. It is really going to be interesting to see how this progresses.