I generally dislike Cringely, but he might be on to something here:

The NTT chip is not just an H.264 decoder, it encodes, too, which is what makes it so special. The last I heard NHK was claiming the chip could compress a 1080p video and audio stream into four megabits per second, down from the 20 megabits normally required. If we assume Apple will apply the same kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge transcoding to 1080p that they've already applied to 720p in the Apple TV, then it is within reason to expect they'll claim to distribute 1080p over iTunes in two megabits per second.


Now this is a smart explanation for the upcoming new chip action in Macs. Rather than using a new type of main processor (which nobody thinks is coming) or a new chipset for Intel (which everyone thinks is coming for some strange reason, though, as I just blogged, I hope Nvidia does show up), this is putting a dedicated video chip into many Macs, which is brilliant. It's like Altivec all over again, but outside of Intel.

As Cringely says...
If we assume Apple will apply the same kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge transcoding to 1080p that they've already applied to 720p in the Apple TV, then it is within reason to expect they'll claim to distribute 1080p over iTunes in two megabits per second.


Getting faster video downloads is a big deal. If Apple can do it first and well, they'll've done something.