ARC claims its video sub-systems are spiffing

With an increased range of video sub-systems, ARC International reckons it has cracked this problem -especially where cameraphones are concerned.

Aiming at ASIC and SoC (system-on-chip) designers, ARC claims it achieves approximately a 300 per cent improvement in video quality compared to encoders typically found in today's mobile phones.

This has been measured using the City video benchmark (a 30 second video clip of the Manhattan skyline), ARC claims.

"[ARC's] sub-systems' very low power consumption coupled with high performance and very small die size make them ideal to incorporate into next generation SoCs that are trying to hit low price points, " argues Richard Wawrzyniak, an analyst at Semico Research.

ARC is particularly proud of the AV 4xxx range's support for 'dynamic encoding'. Dynamic encoding allows designers to adjust the encoding process in a phone with a fully charged battery versus one running close to empty, for example.

The top of the range 700 core sub-system, the AV 417V, even supports two 128-bit SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) processors.

They can handle virtually every video standard you can shake a stick at including MPEG-4 and H.264.

Why should anyone bother with such video processing power? Well, the worldwide installed base of cameraphones will top 1.5 billion units by 2010.

And those using highly efficient video encoding will produce much better clips to post to the likes of Youtube. So the race is on.µ

L'INQ
ARC