This month DSP core licensor CEVA announced an unusual multimedia acceleration technology called MediaMagic. Instead of using specialized hardware accelerators, MediaMagic improves multimedia performance using a software technique CEVA calls a "pattern recognition engine." The pattern recognition engine maintains a table of previously-calculated results for algorithms such as the DCT. When multimedia application software invokes one of these algorithms, the pattern recognition engine determines whether the algorithm was invoked using the same data in a previous iteration. If so, the pattern recognition engine skips the calculation and simply re-uses the previously calculated result. CEVA claims that this approach allows the processor to avoid calculations as much as 90% of the time.
MediaMagic is included as part of CEVA's Mobile-Media solution, which includes a CEVA-X or CEVA-Teak DSP core, MediaMagic hardware, software libraries, and tools. The CEVA Mobile-Media solution is available for licensing today and is positioned by CEVA as a single programmable platform for a wide variety of audio, video, and imaging applications.
When using the MediaMagic pattern recognition engine, CEVA claims its CEVA-Teak and CEVA-X1620 cores are competitive with hardwired solutions in terms of performance and energy efficiency. For example, CEVA claims that a CEVA-Teak running the pattern recognition engine requires 71 MHz to simultaneously decode AAC audio and 30 frame-per-second, CIF-resolution H.264 video. According to CEVA, this decoding consumes just 30 mW, including power for the core, memory, and peripherals.
One potential disadvantage of MediaMagic is that pattern-matching results consume a significant amount of data memory, typically between 16 and 32 Kwords, according to CEVA. However, this amount of memory is typically much smaller than the memory required to hold, for example, one frame of video. Thus, the additional data memory consumed by MediaMagic may be insignificant for many applications.
If CEVA's claims hold true, MediaMagic is a compelling technology for chip designers who want to support multiple audio/video standards in their products and also for those who want flexibility in the face of changing standards and specifications.
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