The Smart Digital Sign Developers Daydream About

March 27, 2014 by Dave Haynes

LenS9

Bryan Mongeau runs the tech and developer teams at Broadsign and keeps an eye on the smart TV and all-in-one display markets in Asia, ever on the lookout for big-ass panels that would fully meet his aspirations for a truly smart digital sign.

He spotted and sent along a Liputing post, via Engadget, about a new Lenovo display – yes the PC maker does panels, too – shown at what appears to be a trade show somewhere in China.

It’s a 50-inch TV with a a Tegra K1 processor, which has an ARM A15 quad-core CPU and a 192-core Kepler graphics processor. I don’t have a propeller beanie so I can’t tell you much about what those numbers and letters mean, except that it is capable of driving graphics as good as what you’d get on high-end laptops and gaming consoles.

So doing digital signage video and motion graphics would barely raise its resting pulse.

It’s called the Lenovo Terminator S9 smart TV, and sadly it’s not sold in North America. But it’s another sign of what’s coming – very high graphics capabilities on teeny chips, and no need for PCs in behind panels.

What’s also interesting about this is that all that horsepower is built into a smart card that snaps into the back. so this is a bit like the Open Pluggable Spec with removable computing devices. So you could buy this, and if there is a problem or you want to upgrade, the Smart Card gets swapped without moving the panel.

Leave a comment