Silicon Graphics Inc and its MIPS Technologies Inc yesterday announced Magic Carpet, a chip set that combines Silicon Graphics’s multimedia technlogy with the MIPS RISC to create a much cheaper set of building blocks for interactive television set-top boxes. Silicon Graphics reports that Magic Carpet has already received endorsements from AT&T Corp’s AT&T Network Systems, Philips Electronics NV and Samsung Electronics Co, all of which say they will use the technology in their communications and interactive consumer product lines, while Time Warner Inc’s Time Warner Cable supports the use of Magic Carpet for interactive applications. Magic Carpet combines the 64-bit R4300i with a Media Accelerator designed to provide two full-screen broadcast-quality MPEG-2 video streams simultaneously and offers three-dimensional audio and video using less bandwidth at lower costs than other technologies being tested, and could lead to the creation of virtual reality applications such a home walk-through or a travel fly-through. The partners reckon the set will bring the cost of set-top boxes down below $500. The chip set costs about $100 in volume, and even if the end price of boxes is over $500, it should be a lot better than the $3,000 that the boxes used in the Orlando, Florida trial being run by Time Warner. Magic Carpet could also cut the price of setting up an interactive network because of the lower bandwidth required by virtue of the intelligence in the chips, since some of the video, graphics and audio can be generated locally so that all of it does not have to be sent over the network. Magic Carpet is claimed to be programmable to read any video, audio or graphics standard and is not confined to MPEG-2, the companies say.
