Our ears always perk up when an encoding chip is mentioned and since it’s been some time since any specialist ASIC encoding architectures were unveiled to drive large scale, real time encoding, it’s been quite a wait.
Of course Imagination Technologies doesn’t actually make chips, just designs graphics cores for other people’s chips. However, our ears pricked up when someone in the office said “Imagination launches an encoder at MWC.”
It’s been a few weeks since then, but we caught up with Peter McGuinness, director of multimedia technology at Imagination, and asked him what the target market is. Of course the company is not in its first generation, this is more about taking encoders to the next level.
McGuinness showed us a slide of the products that he sees the new encoder being used in, and it includes smartphones, tablets, Google Glass, security cams, wearables, and devices like the Go Pro – generically referred to as an action cam. At Faultline we haven’t really thought hard about the purely FUN things you can do with a HEVC full UHD encoder, because we spend all our time thinking of the real time video encoding industry, which is FOR fun, but not much fun of itself – if you see what we mean.
But Go Pro and its copycats are big business, with revenues of $1.4 billion last year on good margins. Action cams like Go Pro are the equivalent of video selfies but with attitude – usually they are located on your surf board, bike, ice skates, parachute or dog and take video from an unusual viewpoint. Go Pro markets them under the Hero brand, which boast universal HD output across the range – and have attracted large audiences for these unique perspectives on YouTube.
Almost as if it’s an omen of things to come, we note that Go Pro uses Ambarella, the same chip that was used for the previous generation of about 75% of the real time encoders in pay TV. Like pay TV, the encroaching power of general purpose chips is muddying the water, about whether or not there is enough of a benefit in designing an ASIC for encoding and decoding UHD video – or leave it to existing general purpose designs. But the mobile industry already make a huge amount of use out of offloading general processing work to devices like the Imagination Technologies Power VR GPUs.
Interestingly Go Pro decided to go proprietary in its last generation of devices, and put the CineForm Codec, designed back in 2002 for compressed workflows for film or TV. It’s a Wavelet encoding system – think JPEG2000 for the lossless version – so it’s focused on quality rather than high compression. Eight minutes of video eats up about 4GB of memory, which is not too much of a concern if you have a 64GB memory card. However, longer recordings require larger or additional memory cards, which artificially hikes their price – alongside the rights needed in editing software to manage the CineForm codec.
HEVC is going to compress that video down a lot more and next generation products will want to become part of the generic video ecosystem, which is why a company like Imagination has targeted bringing that kind of capability to your phone, as well as driving down the BOM of action cams substantially. In a funny way action cams are already wearables, and McGuinness can obviously see the two genres merging somewhat.
Imagination especially sees this taking off among its license base of chip companies like Spreadtrum, HiSilicon and MediaTek, as well as Intel, rather than Qualcomm driven devices – because Qualcomm resolutely tries to avoid using other company’s GPUs and video acceleration technology, as it has its own.
There are three core designs, the E5800 which can show full UHD on a domestic smart TV, in 60 frames a second and full 10-bit color contrast. It is this top end device that McGuinness hopes will challenge in the action cam space, as well as in flagship smart phones and tablets. The previous generation of Imagination devices were like Go Pro, simply powered by H.264 with HD.
Next comes the E5505 for mainstream devices offering 8-bit color and 4K resolution but only at 30 frames per second. Finally there is the E5300 for wearables and in car applications and things like doorbell cameras, where the compression will come down to a 3 Mbps stream. And so my favorite potential application – of seeing someone who is at my door at home, and speaking to them through my smartphone – will become a more high quality experience.
But these cores still look like they may have some professional use to us, or some distant cousins of these chips. Ambarella was the basis of the real time encoding industry and this is designed as a replacement for it, so it’s just a matter of time before someone tries to build one out of a chip that has this core in. After all the current “upstart” that is shaking the industry, Elemental Technologies, built its reputation on the Nvidia GPU, and that made a substantial difference – why shouldn’t a real time specialist encoder chip from Imagination come with the same credentials.