Aricent’s High Efficiency Video Codecs (HEVC) helps silicon vendors quickly build 4K Ultra HD video solutions that consume considerably less power and bandwidth.

Redwood City, CA and Barcelona MWC 2014, 24 Feb 2014: Aricent, a premier engineering services and software company, today announced that it is leveraging ARM® Mali™ Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and parallel computing technology to develop HEVC (H.265) codecs that consume less power and bandwidth whilst delivering an Ultra HD video experience to users.

“ARM welcomes the progress made by Aricent in leveraging the GPU Compute capabilities of the ARM Mali family to optimize their video codecs,” said Nizar Romdhane, director of ecosystem, media processing group, ARM. “The Aricent HEVC implementation illustrates the superior performance and energy efficiency achievable through software and hardware optimization of ARM Mali and ARM Cortex®-A processor technologies.”

While HEVC (H.265) provides better quality, it also poses challenges in coming up with equally efficient platforms that can cater to the computational needs of such a complex video coding algorithm. More intensive computation leads to more power consumption, which impacts the user experience. By leveraging the great computational capabilities of the ARM Mali-T600 GPU implementation, Aricent has been able to offload a significant portion of the CPU load to the GPU, and this enables a significant reduction in power consumption during HEVC computation.

“ARM continuously strives to deliver high performance platforms that consume less power while meeting the ever increasing computational needs of modern multimedia solutions. Our HEVC solution leverages ARM Mali GPU Compute in concert with NEON optimizations on the ARM Cortex-A multi-core CPU to make Ultra HD video content streaming a reality,” said Giri KK Vice President of Engineering at Aricent.

“Aricent’s HEVC solution allows semiconductor companies to quickly integrate this next generation codec in their power optimized reference designs for multiple segments such as mobile devices, consumer electronics, and automotive,” Giri added.

Aricent’s HEVC solution can be easily integrated with multi-screen adaptive streaming engines such as HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) or MPEG-DASH (Moving Picture Expert Group-Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) to support streaming of Ultra HD content. This is most suitable for content providers because with such a solution they can provide an unprecedented user experience by combining ability of HEVC to encode the Ultra HD content with a very high compression ratio at low bandwidth, with adaptive streaming.