Monday of this week the WebM team quietly released information about the hardware encoder/decoder for the VP8 codec. This is, according to them, “the worlds first VP8 hardware encoder”. What does this really mean? Google is going to have an edge in the consumer devices market due to the low power, low cost, and multi-bus interface they’re offering.
Low cost you say? That’s correct. They’re licensing the VHDL/Verilog sources at no cost. If you’re more of the multi-codec kindof company, there is even a commercial vendor offering RTL based sources to vendors looking to produce their own silicon.
The part that really blows my mind is that to deliver 1080p video at 30fps, it requires “less than 100MHz clock frequency”. At that point, it’s well within a lot of commodity ARM processors. If the bus interfaces were there, i’d challenge someone to take that 2010 ninja badge and do some dirty with it.
Want to read more? Check it out.
Overview: https://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/introducing-anthill-first-vp8-hardware.html
Hardware Details: https://www.webmproject.org/hardware/