Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Some Thoughts on Media Co-Processors
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 01:00 PM
I receive an anonymous message from someone named "John" who had some interesting thoughts on media co-processors in Pocket PCs. Take it away John...
"First of all, I am a hardware engineer. Recently NeoMagic annouced a new chip with APA(Associative Processor Array) architecture. This technology is absolutely fasinating. For PDAs without dedicated MPEG4 decoding hardware, CPU handles the job. It is slow even at 400Mhz! High clock speed burns a lot of power. The HP 5xxx PDAs has the MediaQ processor in it which has dedicated MPEG4 hardware decoder, so performance is better, and power is also reduced. However, APA can do much better. APA chips can run at 20Mhz for MPEG4 decoding and better performance. That saves a lot of power!
What does APA architecture look like? It is a expandable(scalable) 2-dimensional array of processing elements. Each processing elements contain memory as well as computing hardware! To process an image, just send it to the APA arrays, and simultaneously instruct every processing element process every bit of image data. Compare that to a CPU or a dedicated hardware datapath, you would need to send blocks and blocks of image data through the CPU/hardware datapath. To get good performance you need to run it at high clock speed. APA architecture gives you massively parallel processing.
What's more. NeoMagic's APA chip already has MPEG4 encoding algorithm implemented as well. (MediaQ does have MPEG4 encoding hardware yet). You can also implement other algorithms such as speech recognition on APA. That's how flexible APA is. No additional dedicated hardware is required. APA is perfect for PDA, Cellphone devices. We will soon be able to have real-time 30fps TWO way video communications on our cellphones/PDAs with this technology. Hopefully this will give your reader some ideas what's to come in future portable devices.
You can learn more about the APA technology in this white paper."
"First of all, I am a hardware engineer. Recently NeoMagic annouced a new chip with APA(Associative Processor Array) architecture. This technology is absolutely fasinating. For PDAs without dedicated MPEG4 decoding hardware, CPU handles the job. It is slow even at 400Mhz! High clock speed burns a lot of power. The HP 5xxx PDAs has the MediaQ processor in it which has dedicated MPEG4 hardware decoder, so performance is better, and power is also reduced. However, APA can do much better. APA chips can run at 20Mhz for MPEG4 decoding and better performance. That saves a lot of power!
What does APA architecture look like? It is a expandable(scalable) 2-dimensional array of processing elements. Each processing elements contain memory as well as computing hardware! To process an image, just send it to the APA arrays, and simultaneously instruct every processing element process every bit of image data. Compare that to a CPU or a dedicated hardware datapath, you would need to send blocks and blocks of image data through the CPU/hardware datapath. To get good performance you need to run it at high clock speed. APA architecture gives you massively parallel processing.
What's more. NeoMagic's APA chip already has MPEG4 encoding algorithm implemented as well. (MediaQ does have MPEG4 encoding hardware yet). You can also implement other algorithms such as speech recognition on APA. That's how flexible APA is. No additional dedicated hardware is required. APA is perfect for PDA, Cellphone devices. We will soon be able to have real-time 30fps TWO way video communications on our cellphones/PDAs with this technology. Hopefully this will give your reader some ideas what's to come in future portable devices.
You can learn more about the APA technology in this white paper."
