STMicro quits STB business

[Llew]

Chip manufacturer STMicro is running down its STB chip manufacturing business.

I hope they keep their chip PDF info online, very informative.

STMicro Exits Set-Top Boxes, Eliminates Jobs as Sales Wane

 

[A nonymous]

Lets face it, the SH4 chipset family hardly did them any favours. I'm slowly getting rid of my SH4 based boxes in favour of Broadcom MIPS based ones.

 

[archive10]

Lets face it, the SH4 chipset family hardly did them any favours. I'm slowly getting rid of my SH4 based boxes in favour of Broadcom MIPS based ones.

The ST ones we had weren't too bad. Our STBs were mostly dogged by sh*tty box design & bad stack integration work.
We are now using Broadcom in our newer boxes - but that's due to the STB vendors being able to deliver the desired package using BCM technology, rather than for any specific SoC preferences.
And interestingly, BCM have since last year moved from MIPS cores to ARM cores for their CPUs.
Not that this makes any difference for the end-user - it just means that the tool-chains for software development is different (and it is more difficult to align the stacks running on STBs with different generation BCM SoCs...)

 

[A nonymous]

The SH4 based ones i had were mostly awful, The Alien 2 just about became a usable box before i got rid of it. The only one i have left is the nBox 5800sx which suffers from the jitters when you watch anything in HD. Its ok for use in the bedroom and thats just about it. Its not worth selling as its worth about as much as a bag of sugar.

The Alien SHD8900 wasn't a bad box, but thats the only one i would say was any good.