Cavium prototypes wireless H.264 video

YOU PROBABLY KNOW ABOUT Cavium from its security, network or storage processors. Recently, it bought W&W Communications, makers of wireless H.264 video solutions.

The W&W, now Cavium chips are called the CNW36XX/35XX/31XX/22XX, don't actually do video, they just prep it for transmission. One end encodes an HD video stream, the other end decodes it, and it is packaged for sending over any wireless solution with enough bandwidth. The Cavium parts are network agnostic.

A prototype wireless video board

Normally, video like this is very latency sensitive, and H.264 needs a complete frame before it can compress and send the data. This adds serious latency, and could kill the chances of a chip for anything resembling gaming. To solve this, Cavium developed ways to start compression before a full frame is done, taking latency down to sub-frame levels.

There are also tricks that the chips can pull, including streaming pre-encoded H.264 to the far end without any encoding on the near. This allows for pass-through type applications, and could be useful in a connected home. They also allow full VBR encoding.

Cavium will not talk about end user products or companies, it is still a bit early for that. If you read between the lines in the press releases and web site, you will see an awful lot of glowing quotes from Pioneer.

Coincidence? µ