Intel continues to recycle its older notebook and desktop products into the consumer electronics market. Yesterday, at Intel Developer Forum Taiwan, the chip giant introduced a 'new' chipset aimed at set-top boxes.

The 854 supports the 130nm, 600MHz Ultra-Low Voltage Celeron M processor across a 400MHz system bus. The chipset connects the CPU to up to 2GB of 333MHz DDR SDRAM. System video comes courtesy of the integrated Extreme Graphics 2 engine; sound is generated by an AC'97 2.3 controller with 20-bit audio.

For connectivity, there's a 10/100Mbps Ethernet controller, six PCI slots and support for up to six USB 2.0 ports. Internal peripherals can be hooked up across the chipset's two Ultra ATA/100 buses. The South Bridge is Intel's old ICH4-M part.

Interestingly, the chipset is being touted for its Windows CE 5.0 support, for which it has been validated by Microsoft. Intel offers a 854 development kit which includes the necessary component drivers for WinCE.

According to a DigiTimes report (http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050412A2004.html), Tatung and Toshiba are just two consumer electronics vendors who have adopted the 854 for, respectively, set-top boxes and HDD-equipped DVD players. Samsung, Gigabyte and Thomson are on board too, apparently. ®

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