Oh my, i almost started to am drooling all over the new Sunplus 8000 media chip that is soon to come out. The Sunplus 8000 chipset will be a tri core chip with a ARM926, DSP and 3D graphic engine all built into one low priced (read CHEAP) chip. The chip will be capable of playing hi res videos that are up to a resolution of 1280×720, this is something that we have not yet seen in any Chinese MP4 Player and for the most part in any other PMP from anywhere else.

Sunplus is claiming that the new chip, with its 3D engine, will be capable of supporting 8/16/32 and 64bit games, so expect to see some serious consle emulation on players carrying this chip set.

One of the added features of the chipset is its ability for added peripherals, the company claims that CMMB (Hi Def video transmission standard in China) will be supported along with Wifi support also. Other features, which are now pretty standard on players, will be support for camera and TV Out, but the company does claim that their chip will be able to support higher mega pixel cameras and will be able to output video at higher resolutions for the video out feature.

Off course the above mentioned features of the new chip are what it can handle, it will be up to the MP4 player manufacturers to actually implement the features on to their players, much like how the current popular Rockchip and Ingenic chips can do a lot of stuff but manufacturers have been slow to actually utilize the full power of those chips.

One other possible downside to the chip is Sunplus itself, the company is best known for producing very cheap all in one media chips,  which could do a lot but never really had any proper software written for them to fully utilize the chip.  To be honest, for the most part players using Sunplus chipsets tend to be unstable and very buggy, mostly due to the poor firmware running the player (which is made by Sunplus themselves). Their new 8000 series chip seems like quite a powerful chip, but in the end if Sunplus keeps to their trend of making poor firmware, you will probably not see wide implementation of this new chipset.

The first company that will be using this chipset will be JXD, who tend to favor the Sunplus chipset in general for most of their players. Expect to see two of their older players, the JXD 638 and JXD 206 being redone with the Sunplus 8000 chip and the player will retain the same name but will have the + prefix attached to the end of them.

I do think this monster chip, if properly implemented, could put to shame the current RK27xx and JZ47xx chips that are commonly used in Chinese MP4 Players.