This month BDTI and silicon intellectual property licensor ARC International announced completion of BDTI Solution Certification™ of the H.264 video decode performance of the ARC Video Subsystem. The ARC Video Subsystem, the first product to be certified under BDTI’s Solution Certification Service, is a programmable subsystem capable of supporting multiple video standards. In certifying the solution, BDTI has independently verified its performance using proprietary BDTI bitstreams and metrics.
ARC, as the first solution provider to complete BDTI’s Solution Certification process, helped BDTI create a methodology which is both fair and responsive to the needs of video system and SoC developers, including a rigorous and independent certification process. The goal of BDTI’s Solution Certification Service is to provide a basis for fairly comparing multimedia “solutions”—combinations of hardware and software that implement multimedia functions. For H.264, as with many multimedia functions, comparisons based on vendor-reported data are often difficult to make and unreliable. When making performance claims, vendors typically use different algorithm variants (for example, different H.264 profiles), different configurations (for example, frame sizes, frame rates, and bit rates), different test streams, and different metrics. As a result, the reported performance data is difficult to interpret, and impossible to use for fair comparisons. By defining uniform conditions for evaluating solutions, and providing independent certification of vendor-reported results, BDTI’s Solution Certification Service produces standardized performance data that system and SoC developers can trust.
BDTI has released results for the ARC Video Subsystem for BDTI’s “Primary Operating Point.” The Primary Operating Point is one of six Operating Points defined by the BDTI Solution Certification specification for H.264 decoder solutions. Operating Points specify the encoding parameter settings used to generate H.264 bitstreams from proprietary BDTI source video clips. The Primary Operating Point uses the following basic parameter settings: “D1” resolution (720x480 pixels), 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile, and a maximum bit rate of 1.5 Mbps. The Operating Point also defines numerous other parameters that can significantly affect performance. For information on other Operating Points click here.
H.264 decoder solution performance is reported as the minimum clock rate required to decode BDTI’s Primary Operating Point bitstream in real-time. Two important factors that affect the minimum required clock rate are the number of output “delay buffers” used and the performance of external (main) memory. In recognition of these factors, BDTI has chosen to present the minimum clock rate required by the ARC Video Subsystem for real-time operation for a number of output delay buffer sizes and a range of external memory access times (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Minimum clock rate required for real-time decoding of BDTI’s proprietary bitstream.
In the figure, “0 buffers” (i.e., no buffering of output frames) indicates the clock rate required to process the single most processing intensive frame in the video clip in real-time (i.e., 1/30th of a second). Adding delay buffers (each of which holds one decoded frame) smooths the processing load across multiple frames and significantly reduces the required clock rate. As shown by the results, BDTI’s findings confirm ARC’s claim that the ARC Video Subsystem can perform H.264 decoding at 160 MHz in a 0.13 micron process. While the minimum clock rate required is greater than 160 MHz when buffering less than three output frames, buffering multiple output frames is common in many applications.
In addition to the required minimum clock rate, H.264 Solution Certification also generates the following metrics: the minimum external memory bandwidth required for real-time operation, total memory usage, silicon area, and energy consumption (average joules per frame). Silicon area and energy consumption metrics are based on BDTI-specified conditions for characterization of licensable silicon IP (which include TSMC CL013G process, ARM Artisan SAGE-X library, and worst-case temperature, process, and voltage variations). BDTI’s results for the ARC Video Subsystem include a die area of 9.1 mm2 and an average power consumption of 116.4 mW (3.9 joules of energy per frame) For results on other metrics, click here.
By being the first to obtain BDTI Solution Certification for its H.264 decoder solution, ARC has taken a leadership role in bringing better information to the marketplace, and has demonstrated its confidence in the ARC Video Subsystem.
For more information about BDTI Solution Certification, contact BDTI.
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