06 June 2008

OpenMAX DL Libraries For Cortex-A8/NEON and ARM11 Debut

ARM has  rolled out highly optimized source code versions of the OpenMAX DL (Development Layer) libraries for decoding the AAC and MP3 formats in the audio domain, and decoding the MPEG-4 and H.264 formats in the video domain.

These functions have been hand-optimized to exploit the NEON technology instruction set on Cortex-A8 processor and the SIMD instruction set on the ARM1136J-S, the ARM1156T2-S, the ARM1176JZ-S and the ARM11 MPCore processors.  The functions are not complete codecs, but can be used as building blocks to add codec functionality to a product, ARM explained. 

The OpenMAX DL API has been designed to enable rapid implementation and seamless portability of video, image and audio codecs to a variety of hardware implementations.  The availability of these optimized functions will reduce time-to-market and decrease development costs for companies looking provide codec functionality on ARM's latest processor families.

In the future, ARM said it will add optimized functions for JPEG decode, as well as optimized versions of the Signal Processing domain functions including FIR and IIR filters.

The functions can be downloaded free-of-charge from the ARM website. The license granted to these functions entitles the user to integrate them into their own products at no cost. This release updates the previous release of the H.264 and AAC functions.