ARM prepares with SoC for 8K broadcasting
June 8, 2018
By Chris Forrester
Chip-set developers ARM (formerly Advanced RISC Machine, and perhaps better known as UK-based ARM Holdings), now owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group, has announced its Mali-V76 system on a chip. The product is ready for UHD 8K content.
ARM says: “As the world moves towards UHD 8K content, we’re ensuring our IP will support encoding and decoding for content on smartphones and other devices. The Mali-V76 supports 8K decode up to 60fps or four 4K streams at 60fps giving consumers the opportunity to stream four movies, record video while video conferencing, or watch four games in 4K. And at lower resolutions, and still at full HD, Mali-G76 will support up to 16 streams of content, creating a 4×4 video wall, a very popular use case in the Chinese market.”
One of the key benefits of the chip-set’s core design is significantly lower power consumption, which should help ‘next generation’ laptop design in terms of extending battery life, as well as helping gamers. ARM says its Mali-G76 version “gives developers and consumers what they want by delivering 30 per cent more efficiency and performance density . These generational enhancements provide developers with more performance headroom to bring more high-end gaming titles to mobile app ecosystems and enable them to write new apps that integrate augmented and virtual reality into our everyday lives.”
ARM says that Qualcomm, which uses ARM-based SoCs in their ‘always connected’ laptops are achieving “an unprecedented 20+ hours of battery life”.
ARM says that the Mali-V76 supports 10-bit H.264 encoding and decoding as well as HEVC, VP9, VP8 and AVS+ encoding, and in its 4K mode can also handle High Frame Rate processing. “Arm’s ambitions are very forward-looking given the longer timeframe between generation, and as a result at a nominal frequency of 600MHz, an 8 core design is slated to be able to decode up to decode videos up to 8Kp60, and encode up to 8Kp30. Or for a smaller 4 core design, that becomes 4Kp120 decoding and 4Kp60 encoding. As previously stated, this is twice the throughput per-core of the V61, meaning that at least at nominal frequencies, this is the first Arm video processor block suitable for 8K video (as well as high frame rate 4K),” says ARM.