| Alchemy mobile processor gains DivX support |
Oct. 11, 2006
Raza Microelectronics Inc. (RMI) has obtained DivX certification for its Au1200 Alchemy processor from DivX Inc., creators of the DivX video media format. The newly certified DivX drivers for the Au1200 will allow handhelds and other low-power devices based on the SoC (system-on-chip) to decode high-quality DivX video, RMI says.
Au1200
When it was rolled out by AMD in January of 2005, the Alchemy Au1200 was described as a MIPS32-based SoC featuring hardware acceleration for MPEG, DivX, H.263, and WMV9. According to RMI, the Au1200 supports fast media downloads and high-quality video "efficiently delivered" at full-frame rates, with low-power consumption. The chip's integrated Media Acceleration Engine is claimed capable of decoding DivX media files with up to D1 resolution at 30 frames per second.
The highly integrated SoC features a MIPS32 core with 16KB each of instruction and data cache, along with a plethora of on-chip peripheral interfaces, including IDE, dual-UARTs, USB 2.0, GPIO, an SDIO/MMC card interface, AC'97 audio, and more.
Au1200 block diagram
DivX
DivX has developed what it claims is "the world's most popular video compression technology." The company says its codec can compress the entire contents of a DVD to fit on a data CD with "virtually no loss in quality." That level of compression also makes DivX video easily transportable over the Internet.
DivX offers codecs for Linux, Windows, and Mac, as well as free and $20 players for Windows and Mac. The company licenses its technology to consumer electronics manufacturers for use in devices such as portable multimedia players (PMPs), DVD players, personal video recorders (PVRs), and digital cameras. It claims that over 46 million DivX Certified hardware devices from a variety of manufacturers have been shipped worldwide.
The Alchemy hot potato
The Alchemy MIPS RISC processor family has had an interesting history. It was originally developed by Alchemy Semiconductor, which was acquired in 2002 by AMD. AMD introduced the MIPS32-based Au1200 in early 2005. This past summer, AMD sold the Alchemy line to RMI, while also investing in RMI.
Availability
RMI offers DivX decode support as part of Au1200 SDKs (software development kits) that target both Linux and Windows CE.
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