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PC Hardware
Panasonic first with 45nm
SoC design from Japan
Intel got beaten by Panasonic as the first company to have 45nm silicon up and running in production quantities. The product is a SoC (System on a Chip) called UniPhier which is designed for digital video compression/decompression.
In other words, the UniPhier is a set top box chip for HD TV which incorporates a fast mutli core CPU and a GPU into a single chip. It also incorporates a memory controller, stream controller, interface controllers and so fort on the same die.
The UniPhier can decode and encode dual 1080p H.264, VC-1 or MPEG-2 HD streams. It can also compress 1080p content by up to three times that of conventional methods used today.
Panasonic has managed to squeeze in 250 million transistors into the UniPhier.
You can read the official press release here
The picture below is of a reference board used for development of set top boxes based on the UniPhier SoC.