Aricent develops high efficiency video codecs by leveraging ARM Mali GPU compute technology

REDWOOD CITY, USA & BARCELONA, SPAIN, MWC 2014: Aricent, a premier engineering services and software company, announced that it is leveraging ARM Mali Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and parallel computing technology to develop HEVC (H.265) codecs that consume less power and bandwidth whilst delivering an Ultra HD video experience to users.

"ARM welcomes the progress made by Aricent in leveraging the GPU Compute capabilities of the ARM Mali family to optimize their video codecs," said Nizar Romdhane, director of ecosystem, media processing group, ARM. "The Aricent HEVC implementation illustrates the superior performance and energy efficiency achievable through software and hardware optimization of ARM Mali and ARM Cortex®-A processor technologies."

While HEVC (H.265) provides better quality, it also poses challenges in coming up with equally efficient platforms that can cater to the computational needs of such a complex video coding algorithm. More intensive computation leads to more power consumption, which impacts the user experience. By leveraging the great computational capabilities of the ARM Mali-T600 GPU implementation, Aricent has been able to offload a significant portion of the CPU load to the GPU, and this enables a significant reduction in power consumption during HEVC computation.

"ARM continuously strives to deliver high performance platforms that consume less power while meeting the ever increasing computational needs of modern multimedia solutions. Our HEVC solution leverages ARM Mali GPU Compute in concert with NEON optimizations on the ARM Cortex-A multi-core CPU to make Ultra HD video content streaming a reality," said Giri KK, VP of Engineering at Aricent.

"Aricent's HEVC solution allows semiconductor companies to quickly integrate this next generation codec in their power optimized reference designs for multiple segments such as mobile devices, consumer electronics, and automotive," Giri added.