June 15, 2012 -- Imagination Technologies, Ltd. has announced the first members of its PowerVR Series4 video cores. The PowerVR Series4 D4500MP video decoder and E4500MP video encoder build on the PowerVR VXD and VXE Series3 multi-standard video codecs. These multi-pipe video IPs deliver features designed to enhance modern applications such as wireless display and video capture with the highest color fidelity, as well as HD and Ultra-HD displays and surfaces.

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.

"With the ability to handle over 1 billion colors in full resolution, the enhanced color 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," commented Tony King-Smith, Vice President of Marketing for Imagination. "With the increasing availability of OLED displays, and 10-bit monitors, which offer a wider color range, consumers are demanding higher color 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."

Life-like color handling in full resolution

PowerVR D4500MP and E4500MP enable increased color depth, providing up to 10bits of precision, allowing over a billion colors to be represented, compared with only 16 million available to traditional 8-bit systems. This increase in color depth allows SOCs to maintain internal processing precision from source to display, allowing true and life-like representation of colors. The increase in colour performance can provide the required color fidelity for the latest generation of 10-bit and OLED displays, to ensure maximum performance. The use of 10bit 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 color formats (and resolutions) can also lead to the blurring of detail caused by interpolation errors, which the use of 4:4:4 virtually eliminates.

Encode and decode performance

PowerVR D4500MP and E4500MP 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 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 include 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 level of performance enables 4K resolution content to be decoded up to H.264 L5.2 4Kx2K at 60fps.

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 at 30fps. E4500MP's input scaler is capable of down-scaling 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 loss-less mode, which is useful for applications requiring the highest fidelity transmission of video.

Availability

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