Date: 06/11/2009

Ittiam unveil audio/video codecs for Mobile Internet on ARM Cortex-A5 processor platform

Ittiam has released a set of audio and video codecs for the ARM Cortex-A5 processor powered by the NEON multimedia-processing engine to process streaming internet multimedia content on smartphones and such mobile internet surfing devices.

The Cortex-A5 processor from ARM is intended for multimedia and internet enabled applications running on mobile devices.

Ittiam has ported its Cortex-A8 processor codec portfolio on the Cortex-A5 processor, the use of the NEON engine provides needed performance boost enabling high fidelity multi-channel audio codecs and computationally intensive effects like 3D audio or virtual surround to run on the Cortex-A5 processor without a additional DSP chip.

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.

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% for audio decoding on the Cortex-A5 processor when compared to an ARM11 family processor.

"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."

"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 pr