ARC adopts clustered parallelism in media multiprocessing

Peter Clarke, EE Times
(10/09/2006 6:44 AM EDT)

LONDON — ARC International plc is developing a scalable multiprocessor architecture aimed at high-definition streaming media and graphics applications called VRaptor. The company's chief scientist Nigel Topham is due to present the architecture to the Fall Processor Forum on Tuesday (Oct. 10).

The architecture is expected to give rise to a number of licensable implementations provided with canned routines for MPEG4 and H.264 applications, set to be released in 2007. In addition ARC will provide architectural licenses and tools to allow customers to design their own multiprocessor architectures and map media processing software to the resulting processor arrays.

VRaptor offers a number of refinements over ARC's current offering for media applications, which is known as ARC Video. VRaptor is based on ARC 750D CPUs. ARC has extended the 128-bit SIMD array that was present in the ARC Video so that it is software programmable and becomes a media processor, off-loading work from the ARC 750D. In addition, the architecture allows clusters of ARC750s together media processors to be arranged flexibly to perform graphics and streaming media loops.

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