Octasic Announces New 1080p-Capable DSP Transcoding Series
几个月前, while preparing invitations for comparative testing of file-based transcoding solutions, I came across a clockless digital signal processing (DSP) chip manufacturer making some interesting claims. Octasic半导体, 一家总部位于蒙特利尔的公司, claimed a board full of its Vocallo Media Gateway (MGW) DSP chips could handle significant transcoding at fairly low power consumption levels.
"Our single PCI-E board is capable of transcoding 355 channels of Quarter CIF (QCIF) at 15 frames per second,约翰·弗莱说, director of sales and business development at Octasic, 当公司 宣布 5月份推出TXP1000 PCI-E板.
The basis for the claims centered on the company's Vocallo multi-core DSP, which it claims can transcode 70 QCIF video channels at one time. 由于每个MGW芯片消耗1.最大功率9瓦, stacking five of the MGW chips on a single-slot PCI-E board is well within the power budget of a PCI-E slot. Accounting for a bit of overhead, one arrives at the "355 channel" claim.
本周, the company is taking the claim a bit further with its OCT2200 series of DSP solutions, based on the second-generation Octasic DSP, 称为Opus2 DSP. Octasic has released two flavors of the 2200 series, OCT2224M和OCT2224W, geared toward media gateways and wireless solutions, 分别.
"An OCT2224M device can simultaneously support 2 channels of 1080p while consuming less than 3 watts of power," said Octasic product manager James Awad in a press release. "That means the new chip will do 3 times the capacity of our first-generation DSP solutions, while increasing power only by 50% over the first-generation version."
While the ability to do 1080p transcoding without additional hardware acceleration on the MGW version, 的OCT2224M, 会吸引人们的目光, the true power of the module shows through in its ability to transcode hundreds of voice and lower-resolution video channels. While the old Vocallo chipset cores ran at 1.2 GHz and were capable of converting 480 voice channels, the newer DSPs can do 800 voice channels per 24-core DSP, yet still only require 3 watts of power. In other words, they offer slightly under twice the capacity with just over 50% additional power.
Extrapolating the solution against the TXP1000 cards 宣布 in May, Octasic could keep the same power budget but would only need three OCT2224M, 而不是五个Vocallo芯片, to convert the same number of voice channels. In addition, 的OCT2224M provides support for all popular video codecs, including MPEG-2, H.264, VC-1, and VP8 for streaming, as well as H.263是视频会议.
Keeping the power budget in line is key to Octasic's other Opus2-based DSP solution, the wireless-focused OCT2224W solution.
"In the baseband arena, power is everything," says Awad. “在新兴市场, 尤其是在偏远地区, the decision is a based on whether a chip or group of chips can run off a solar panel. We find that some solutions providers previously needed half-a-dozen chips to implement a picocell or small base station solution and couldn't do it with the solar panel, but our low-powered DSP-based solutions make it possible."
The emerging markets are also primarily driven by a need for lower operating expense (opex) levels, so while the OCT2224W will support WiMAX and LTE, Awad sees a sizeable continued market interest in GSM and even 3GPP-based video delivery. 在新兴市场, constrained opex and lower average revenue per user (ARPU) are reasons why the company emphasizes QCIF video transcoding alongside the ability to transcode HD video content.
"Utopia is covering all standards at all capacities," said Awad. “这可能是一个白日梦, but we've been able to move closer to that goal in two ways: first, by removing all the circuitry that consumers power but doesn't add to the processing. 第二个, by allowing more programming within the DSP itself, making the end solution flexible with software programming rather than relying on hard-coded hardware as the primary approach."
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