3DLabs has made a play in the media processor market for handheld devices with a chip which is capable of HD 720p H.264 video playback.
Based on a multi-ARM core architecture including a fully programmable array of floating-point processors, the device will performing video, image, audio, 2D/3D graphics and signal processing tasks.
The firm is making available a suite of hardware and software development tools, Codecs and APIs, including H.264, MP3, AAC, JPEG and OpenGL ES.
According to Hock Leow, president of 3DLABS: “The ability to play back a full 720p resolution H.264 video on your HDTV from a portable device consuming less than 1W is an incredible achievement.”
The DMS-02 incorporates 24 floating-point processing elements, dual ARM 926EJ cores, multi-level caches, three bi-directional video stream ports, 32 or 64-bit mobile memory for up to 1.6Gbyte/s bandwidth and peripheral interfaces to LCDs, CMOS sensors, IDE disks, USB OTG, flash memory and Audio DACs.
“We believe this architecture has the ability to scale and address the rich digital media content that consumers are constantly demanding in low powered mobile devices,” said Leow.
According to the firm, the device is OS independent with the first software development kits supporting embedded Linux 2.6.