Ittiam brings multi-format high performance audio and video for mobile Internet world

BANGALORE, INDIA: In keeping with its focus of providing best-in-class audio and video codecs and solutions to the embedded world, Ittiam Systems, a member of the ARM Connected Community, announced the availability of a set of high-quality and high-performance audio and video codecs for the ARM Cortex-A5 processor powered by the NEON multimedia processing engine.

The Cortex-A5 processor is the latest core in the Cortex family intended for a wide range of multimedia and internet enabled applications, from ultra low cost handsets and mobile devices, to embedded consumer or industrial devices.

The processor has been designed for best power and performance ratio, supporting all the tools needed for multimedia while enhancing the performance of the ARM1176Z-S processor within the same area footprint and power of the ARM926EJ-S processor.

With its architecture 100 percent software compatible with the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processors, Ittiam has been able to port its Cortex-A8 processor codec portfolio to offer power optimized audio and video codecs seamlessly on the Cortex-A5 processor, the use of the NEON engine providing a significant performance boost to meet the needs of the demanding mobile world.

As a recognized partner highly committed to best-in-class multimedia solutions, ARM has chosen Ittiam codecs to benchmark the performance of multimedia on the latest Cortex-A5 processor.

Audio codecs including MP3 as well as H.264 Baseline Profile (BP) and MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) video decoders are being benchmarked by ARM on the Cortex-A5 RTL environment representing the real system.

Ittiam codec implementations on Cortex-A processors fully utilize the NEON engine first introduced in the Cortex-A8 processor, delivering a big performance benefit.

This enables high fidelity multi-channel audio codecs as well as computationally intensive effects like 3D audio or virtual surround to run on the Cortex-A5 processor, without the need for DSP, for a broad range of applications such as portable devices, in-car entertainment, gaming, home theater and digital TV.

ARM has benchmarked the Ittiam MP3 audio decoder and MPEG-4 video decoder on a Cortex-A5 processor using a 100 percent cycle accurate RTL emulation together with RealView Developer Suite 4.0; the results show a performance gain of 25 percent for audio decoding on the Cortex-A5 processor when compared to an ARM11 family processor.

With NEON technology-optimized Ittiam implementation, the MP3 decoder consumes on an average 9 MHz of the Cortex-A5 CPU, leaving significant headroom for other compute intensive tasks or allowing low power operation through downward frequency scaling.

"The ARM Cortex-A5 processor with NEON technology which was announced two weeks ago has been designed to bring full internet with high quality multimedia to mobile and embedded devices everywhere," said Travis Lanier, Cortex-A5 product manager, ARM.

"The availability of Ittiam's audio and video codecs optimized for the NEON architecture extension will help further accelerate the adoption of NEON technology-enabled processors, such as the Cortex-A5 processor, as well as future ARM processors in next-generation multimedia devices."

Complementing the audio and video codecs, Ittiam offers a broad set of multimedia capabilities such as the acoustic components and audio effects for mobile, multichannel audio for home theater, streaming stacks, middleware and frameworks to serve the mobile, portable media, digital TV applications.

All these software components are available now on Android, Linux, Windows CE or Windows Mobile thanks to the Cortex-A5 processor's architectural and OS compatibility.

"The Cortex-A5 processor is a unique combination of the power efficiency and high performance required for multimedia and mobile Internet," said Shantanu Jha, Vice President, Media Processing at Ittiam.

"As a proof of a strong and long standing partnership with ARM, Ittiam is proud to enable best in the industry audio and video codecs as well as multimedia systems on the Cortex-A5 processor for the next-generation multimedia and internet-capable devices."

The Ittiam codecs and middleware are available for licensing starting now and can be complemented with integration services for faster track to market.