LONDON – We are used to processor IP companies ARM and Imagination battling to gain design wins for their CPU and GPU cores, but now the contest has moved into the realm of video rendering.
At the beginning of June ARM announced it was moving into video processor cores with the Mali-V500 as a complement to its Mali graphics processors. Meanwhile video rendering is something Imagination has done for some time and spanning many standards. But as ARM starts trying to compete there are significant differences in approach between the two companies.
The Mali-V500 is a multicore video solution that combines encoding and decoding in one core and scales from a single core capable of 1080p/60 frames per second encode and decode to multiple cores supporting 4K video at 120 frames per second.