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News Release from: Silicon Hive | Subject: HiveFlex 2500
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 16 November 2007
Multiprocessor platform takes full HD
onboard
Silicon Hive's HiveFlex 2500 processor and AllGo's optimised H.264 codec software can be combined on an SoC to offer HD video signal processing.
Silicon Hive and AllGo Embedded Systems demonstrated a fully programmable full high definition H.264 Baseline Level 4 decoder solution at the Embedded Technology Exhibition in Yokohama, Japan The solution targeting high definition (HD) video signal processing SoC manufacturers builds on Silicon Hive's HiveFlex 2500 processor and AllGo's optimised H.264 codec software
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 18 Jun 2003 at 8.00am (UK)
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The companies are further co-operating to supply the market with main and high profile decoding solutions as well as introducing an H.264 1080p encoding solution in 2008.
As the HiveFlex 2500 from Silicon Hive is a fully programmable video processor it can run other common standards such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and VC-1 etc - in addition to the H.264 standard.
The unique software architecture from AllGo ensures highly optimised memory and bandwidth usage for the codec, coupled with dynamic scalability for different frame sizes.
The HiveFlex VSP 2500, a multiprocessor system, consists of a 32bit VLIW stream processor and several video processing tiles.
The number of these processor tiles depends on the resolution and functionality of the target system.
A two-tile system is targeted at multistandard 1080p decoding solutions for SoC developers in consumer electronics, portable appliances and mobile phone markets.
The unique HiveCC compiler and the associated programming tool set support rapid development of codec software on the multiprocessor system.
The HiveFlex 2500 uses a (patent pending) memory input/output architecture that was specifically designed to alleviate common memory bandwidth bottlenecks found in full HD video systems.
AllGo Embedded Systems ported its C language H.264 software kernels to the HiveFlex VSP 2500 processor and optimised them to maximally exploit the HiveFlex VSP2500 tile architecture, VLIW engines and data-level parallelism.
Optimised features of the software include: partitioning; vectorising parts of the algorithms to take advantage of the VSP 2500 hardware; balancing the loads across multiple tiles thereby avoiding stalls; and reducing intertile communications to a minimum.
This results in a solution that runs at 250MHz clock speeds for a 30 frames per second 1080p H.264 implementation.
"Many companies already offer software-only video codecs".
"However, working together with AllGo Embedded Systems, we have crafted the only fully programmable system capable of decoding full HD resolutions on a SoC platform available today".
"Working closely with AllGo Embedded Systems has enabled Silicon Hive to optimise the HiveFlex 2500 not only for H.264 decoding but for all other video codecs".
"Unlike other solutions in the market, the HiveFlex VSP2500 IP core truly re-uses all hardware resources when running multiple codecs resulting in an area optimised for multi-codec environments", said George Szanto Silicon Hive's Vice President of Marketing.
"We are excited with this approach to providing true HD encode-decode capability on a fully programmable platform", said PVG Menon, Vice President Sales and Marketing of AllGo Embedded Systems.
"We believe the way for cost-effective realisation of products offering support for multi-standard video solutions will be by using flexible processor platforms such as the HiveFlex-2500".
"AllGo Systems is proud to be part of this path-breaking effort", he added.
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