By BDTI, 10/11/2004
This month DSP core licensor CEVA announced an
unusual multimedia acceleration technology called MediaMagic. Instead
of using specialized hardware accelerators, MediaMagic improves
multimedia performance using a software technique CEVA calls a "pattern
recognition engine." The pattern recognition engine maintains a table
of previously-calculated results for algorithms such as the DCT. When
multimedia application software invokes one of these algorithms, the
pattern recognition engine determines whether the algorithm was invoked
using the same data in a previous iteration. If so, the pattern
recognition engine skips the calculation and simply re-uses the
previously calculated result. CEVA claims that this approach allows the
processor to avoid calculations as much as 90% of the time.
MediaMagic is included as part of CEVA's
Mobile-Media solution, which includes a CEVA-X or CEVA-Teak DSP core,
MediaMagic hardware, software libraries, and tools. The CEVA
Mobile-Media solution is available for licensing today and is
positioned by CEVA as a single programmable platform for a wide variety
of audio, video, and imaging applications.
When using the MediaMagic pattern recognition engine, CEVA claims its
CEVA-Teak and CEVA-X1620 cores are competitive with hardwired solutions
in terms of performance and energy efficiency. For example, CEVA claims
that a CEVA-Teak running the pattern recognition engine requires 71 MHz
to simultaneously decode AAC audio and 30 frame-per-second,
CIF-resolution H.264 video. According to CEVA, this decoding consumes
just 30 mW, including power for the core, memory, and peripherals.
One potential disadvantage of MediaMagic is that
pattern-matching results consume a significant amount of data memory,
typically between 16 and 32 Kwords, according to CEVA. However, this
amount of memory is typically much smaller than the memory required to
hold, for example, one frame of video. Thus, the additional data memory
consumed by MediaMagic may be insignificant for many applications.
If CEVA's claims hold true, MediaMagic is a compelling
technology for chip designers who want to support multiple audio/video
standards in their products and also for those who want flexibility in
the face of changing standards and specifications.
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