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Samsung DVD-N501 DVD Player Review
Samsung DVD-N501 DVD Player Review - PCSTATS
There are a host of DVD players on the consumer market to choose from these days. What causes the DVD-N501 to stand out is the inclusion of a Nuon chip.
 92% Rating:   
Filed under: Home Theatre Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: Samsung Jun 12 2001   Max Page  
Home > Reviews > Home Theatre > Samsung DVD-N501

What is Nuon?

Background on Nuon Technology

Nuon technology adds programmable processing power to digital consumer electronics devices, like the DVD-N501. The embedded chip provides an interactive software platform on top of the host machines' standard operations. In addition to providing a platform for embedded interactivity, the Nuon architecture provides extra computing power to decode digital video and audio, and the ability to deliver "trick modes" and an enhanced user interface. The Nuon chip is a highly parallel and scaleable processor and is reported by the parent company, VM Labs, to be capable of executing over 1.5 billion instructions per second.

The BGA Nuon chip is 128 bit and roughly equivalent in performance to a 500MHz Pentium II processor from what we can dig up. The technology supports video telephony, a soft modem, internet navigation and networking, although none of these features are included in the DVD-N501 DVD player.

The Nuon game controller.

"The NUON media processor is extremely flexible, and capable of supporting a whole range of totally new graphics effects and algorithms such as voxels, plasma, procedural textures, parametric modeling, particle systems, and even some ray tracing. At the very least, they can totally customize the 3D pipeline to provide optimized performance for each specific title. Special effects are designed by the developer, and not the hardware manufacturer. This flexibility empowers the developer and offers a way to really differentiate new content."

Our review unit can bundled with a Nuon game called Ballistic. Our first impressions were kind of low on the game, but it proved to be really addictive... so I guess that's a good thing. I won't go too much into the detail of the actual game, but essentially it follows in the lines ot Tetris, but rather then working with square shapes falling from the ceiling you work with different coloured balls moving along a spiraling track.

If we consider each of the balls to be one sprite we can gauge how well the Nuon chip runs the system. From what we saw the game play was quite fast for the most part, but did slow down slightly when the spiral track was almost full of many different coloured sprites in the more complex stages.

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Contents of Article: Samsung DVD-N501
 Pg 1.  Samsung DVD-N501 DVD Player Review
 Pg 2.  DVD-N501 Controls and Features
 Pg 3.  The remote and outputs
 Pg 4.  — What is Nuon?
 Pg 5.  Conclusions

 
Hardware Sections 


 
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