ARM has been steadily baking more and more security features into its chips and has even been trying to set industry standards, forming industry alliances around its TrustedZone technology. Now it is adding piracy protection at chip level, announcing digital rights management additions to its Mali graphics processor platform.
The company unveiled new models in its Cortex mobile processor and Mali GPU families at this week’s Computex show in Taiwan, including the Mali-V500, a midrange graphics chip which incorporates the new anti-piracy technology. This aims to go beyond software in protecting 1080p-class video though TrustZone capabilities. ARM reportedly consulted Hollywood studios in designing these features, which prevent the copying of copyrighted material as it is streamed or decoded on the device.
Chris Porthouse, director or market development for ARM’s media processors, told CNet: “Hollywood movie studios and major content distributors like Netflix and others are demanding for premium or early window content – their highest-value content – to be protected not just by digital rights management but by the hardware, all the way from download through to display.”
The Mali-V500 is a multicore chip which can reach encoding levels of 1080p/60 and can decode to multiple cores at 120 frames per second, while supporting 4K resolution.