Boxee Box ditches NVIDIA's Tegra 2 for Intel CE4100, pre-orders start today at $199
9/14/2010 01:14:00 AM
kenmouse
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The wait for the Boxee Box is nearly over -- pre-orders begin today -- but before you drop a stack of change on D-Link's half-sunk cube, know that there's no longer an NVIDIA Tegra 2 under that tiny hood. At the last minute, Boxee switched to the Intel Atom CE4100, the same up-to-1.2GHz Sodaville chip powering Google TV. That's not all, as manufacturer D-Link told us our good friend Avner Ronen may not be able to keep his promise -- though the company still expects the Box to hit the streets at under $200, we're now looking at a $229 suggested retail price. What could possibly have happened to make these drastic changes? We visited Boxee in person to get an explanation, and you'll find the surprisingly simple (yet NVIDIA-damning) answer right below.Update: We just learned that Amazon will be selling it for $199, though the MSRP will remain $229.
At a rendezvous in San Francisco, Avner Ronen told us the decision to abandon Tegra 2 was about performance and nothing more: "The major problem we had with the Tegra 2 was support for high-profile HD playback," he said. "You can do high-profile VC-1 with Tegra 2, but not H.264." It was a problem of bitrate, he told us, and while NVIDIA's dual-core Tegra T20 was apparently not up to the task, the team had internally tested Intel's CE4100 decoding streams at up to 90 megabits per second. The newly revamped Boxee Box is now capable of 1080p H.264 playback at 60fps, and... well, that's actually about it. While you'd think that gutting a system might involve a few more tweaks, we were informed that otherwise the Boxee experience is exactly the same, and and you can see for yourself just how little has changed hardware-wise in our gallery above. There's still hardware-accelerated Flash 10.1 playback, the same speedy UI and codecs, the same QWERTY-packing RF remote and all the same ports -- though it does have a freshly updated tally of over 400 apps, plus that new HTML5-compliant WebKit browser.
While we're on the subject of browsers, we took the opportunity to pester Avner about Hulu support -- as the cloak of Mozilla is obviously no longer shielding Boxee from harm -- and were told that yes, it's still possible for Hulu to block Boxee, though he hopes that everyone can just play nice. And speaking of peace offerings, Boxee's founder wants you all to know that the company's still working with NVIDIA, and that it just might consider using the Tegra 3 if or when it comes along. For now, you're getting Intel Inside® whether you like it or not, though it sounds (and felt in a brief test) like it doesn't make a lick of difference either way. If you're still sold on the idea and don't want to wait on our review, we're told US and Canadian citizens will find the Boxee Box for pre-order at Amazon and Best Buy respectively a little later today, while Europeans and Australians will have to wait for the formal November release.
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