Movidius taps Android for multimedia

SEMICONDUCTOR UPSTART Movidius is launching its first chip, which is aimed at meeting the growing demand for better multimedia processing on mobile devices.

The guys at Movidius have spent the last years developing the Myriad architecture, combining both hardware and software to boost applications such as real-time video editing, 3D rendering, HD playback and recording and video enhancements for improving low-bitrate Internet video and mobile television on mobile devices.

The chip consists of eight cores of its own design with a 32-bit Risc controller, stacked DRAM memory and a variety of interfaces. The parallelised floating point vector processors can pump out up to 20Gflops performance.

Being a fabless semiconductor firm, Movidius has the 65nm chip made by TSMC. The first Myriad chip is MA1100 and is sampling now. Coming soon is the MA1102, which can tap directly into a camera feed adding HD video capture and playback.

On the software side, the company has decided to jump on the Android bandwagon by developing a range of applications and features for Google's mobile operating system.

"Consumers are getting more savvy about their mobile phones," said Sean Mitchell, CEO of Movidius. "As the Iphone has proven, today's consumers are buying usability and not just more megapixels."

According to Mitchell, user experience is everything and thus far mobiles have failed to deliver the kind of performance users are looking for. However, while he readily admits it's no silver bullet, Movidius' Myriad Android platform allows applications to include sophisticated video and photo processing to compensate for sub-optimal handset optics.

Most of Myriad's features deal with camera and camcorder image enhancement, video editing and image capture and effects. The system also supports rapid downscaling for easier upload to social networks as well as dual camera input and 3D image processing, just in case all the hype around 3D actually takes off. When it comes to 3D, mobile devices have one distinct advantage, namely that the predictable fixed distance and easy adjustment of the screen makes glassless 3D images a lot easier to do.

There are no details yet about any products using Myriad, but Movidius is aiming to enable a range of mobile devices including phones, camcorders, media players, sat-navs and even netbooks and tablets.

"Myriad is ideal for anything where the multimedia processing is currently constrained," said Mitchell.

The company will be demonstrating the MA1100 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month, so we'll be able to see it in action then and get some definitive numbers for the kind of processing boost involved. µ