Imagination announces new generation PowerVR D4500MP video decoder and E4500MP video encoder

Industry leading colour fidelity, enhanced colour depth and resolution video codecs

June 14, 2012 -- Imagination Technologies, a leading multimedia and communications technologies company, has announced the first members of its PowerVR Series4 video cores. 

The PowerVR Series4 D4500MP video decoder and E4500MP video encoder build on the highly successful PowerVR VXD and VXE Series3 multistandard video codecs. These multi-pipe video IPs deliver features designed to enhance modern applications such as wireless display and video capture with previously unseen levels of colour fidelity, as well as HD and Ultra-HD displays and surfaces (H.264 L5.2 4Kx2K @ 60fps). 

Despite class leading performance these video processor cores deliver small area as well as low power consumption, making them ideal for consumer applications. These cores are fully scalable from single to four pipes, ensuring that the requirements for both 1080P performance in a compact area and low power can be met at the same time as industry leading 4Kx2K performance.

Says Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination: “With the ability to handle over 1 billion colours in full resolution, the enhanced colour handling of PowerVR D4500MP and E4500MP enable significantly crisper and more accurate results for today’s demanding applications, such as wireless display and high quality video capture. With the increasing availability of OLED displays, and 10 bit monitors, which offer a wider colour range, consumers are demanding higher colour fidelity than ever before. Plus, with ‘beyond real time’ HD video handling, the cores are ideal for today’s most widespread displays and applications, while providing more than enough performance for tomorrow’s ultra-HD 4Kx2K applications, such as display surfaces and mosaic screens.”

Lifelike colour handling in full resolution with support for over 1 billion colours

PowerVR D4500MP and E4500MP enable increased colour depth, providing up to 10 bits of precision, allowing over a billion colours to be represented, compared with only 16 million available to traditional 8 bit systems. This increase in colour depth allows SoCs to maintain internal processing precision from source to display, allowing true and lifelike representation of colours. The increase in colour performance can provide the required colour fidelity for the latest generation of 10bit and OLED displays, to ensure maximum performance. The use of 10 bit also helps to reduce banding phenomenon, which can affect 8 bit systems.

To further enhance the colour rendition provided, the video processor cores have increased colour resolution to 4:4:4 (or 4:2:2), which gives full resolution across all components. This makes transitions between YCbCr and RGB far simpler, as no interpolation is needed, making this ideal for wireless display subsystems. Repeated conversions between colour formats (and resolutions) can also lead to the blurring of detail caused by interpolation errors, which the use of 4:4:4 virtually eliminates.

The cores’ increased resolution and fidelity allows applications like camcorders, DSCs, DSLRs and mobile phones to maximize the capabilities of the image sensors, which typically offer at least 10 bits of resolution. This enables them to offer an unprecedented professional quality level, giving manufacturers product differentiation and increased value to consumers.

Encode and decode performance for tomorrow’s applications

PowerVR D4500MP and E4500MP respectively increase the performance for decode and encode of full HD 1080P video applications, which enables realistic super high definition quality, multi-stream HD channel browsing, high frame rate support for detailed slow motion footage of sports events and other content. The new cores also offer class-leading performance for ultra-HD 4Kx2K video, a core-technology for future video applications, providing four times the volume of visual information as an HDTV as well as and ‘wall of information’ surface applications which combine TV with apps, social media and channel browsing.

Inside the cores

PowerVR D4500MP supports all major video standards including H.264 HP, H.264 MP, H.264 BP, H.264 MVC, VC-1, VP8/WebM, H.263, RMVB (Real Video), MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVS, VP6 and JPEG.

PowerVR E4500MP supports multiple standards including H.264 HP, H.264 MP, H.264 BP, H.264 MVC, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and JPEG.

The PowerVR video cores are the industry leader in low power, including the ability to decode H.264HP 1080P30 video in under 15mw (40LP).

The PowerVR D4500MP multi-standard, multi-stream video decoder IP core is a multicore architecture that allows performance to be easily scaled for high resolution or high frame rate applications up to full H.264 level 5.2 using mainstream silicon processes at ultra-low power consumption. This unprecedented level of performance enables 4K resolution content to be decoded up to H.264 L5.2 4Kx2K @ 60fps.

By allowing any format up to H.264 HP (High Profile) streams to be decoded at speeds significantly faster than real time PowerVR D4500MP enables a growing number of valuable applications for enhancing user experiences, including: 1920x1080 120fps decoding for playback of high speed slow-motion material; trick play modes; and video editing. 

PowerVR E4500MP is a multi-standard, multi-stream video encoder, capable of all major HD and still image standards. In addition E4500MP supports resolutions up to 4Kx2K@30fps. E4500MP’s input scaler is capable of downscaling incoming video data. This is useful in a variety of applications including, adaptive streaming, and simulcasting low resolution and high resolution video. The E4500MP core also has support for H.264 lossless mode, which is useful for applications requiring the highest fidelity transmission of video.

The cores are available for licensing now for delivery to lead partners in 2H12. 

About Imagination Technologies 

Imagination Technologies - a global leader in multimedia and communication technologies - creates and licenses market-leading processor solutions for graphics, video, and display, embedded processing, multi-standard communications and connectivity, and cross-platform V.VoIP & VoLTE. These silicon and software intellectual property (IP) solutions for systems-on-chip (SoC) are complemented by an extensive portfolio of software drivers, developer tools and extensive market and technology-focused ecosystems. Target markets include mobile phone and multimedia, connected home consumer, mobile and tablet computing, in-car electronics, telecoms, health, smart energy and connected sensors and controllers. Imagination’s licensees include many of the world’s leading semiconductor, network operator and electronics OEM/ODM companies. Corporate headquarters are located in the United Kingdom, with sales and R&D offices worldwide. See: www.imgtec.com