Movidius taps Android for multimedia

SEMICONDUCTOR UPSTART Movidius is launching its first chip, which is aimed at meeting the growing demand for better multimedia processing on mobile devices.The guys at Movidius have spent the last years developing the Myriad architecture, combining both hardware and software to boost applications such as real-time video editing, 3D rendering, HD playback and recording and video enhancements for improving low-bitrate Internet video and mobile television on mobile devices.

The chip consists of eight cores of its own design with a 32-bit Risc controller, stacked DRAM memory and a variety of interfaces. The parallelised floating point vector processors can pump out up to 20Gflops performance.

Being a fabless semiconductor firm, Movidius has the 65nm chip made by TSMC. The first Myriad chip is MA1100 and is sampling now. Coming soon is the MA1102, which can tap directly into a camera feed adding HD video capture and playback.

On the software side, the company has decided to jump on the Android bandwagon by developing a range of applications and features for Google's mobile operating system.

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