Mali Video Solutions

Mali-VE Video Engines - Bringing Visual Entertainment to Life

The highly flexible and scalable ARM^® Mali™-VE video engine architecture offers the optimum combination of high performance, efficient die size, programmability and low power consumption - making it ideal for mobile solutions and converged consumer applications.

The video engine has a DRAM-friendly and burst-efficient memory access pattern, low memory-bandwidth requirements and very high tolerance for interconnect latency and interconnect arbitration gaps. The Mali-VE video engine is also highly autonomous, placing a minimal load (<1%) on the system processor.

Picture of a Rodeo In order to provide such an efficient solution for both area and power, all pixel processing is performed in dedicated hardware. This includes all image transforms, quantization and de-quantization, motion compensation, filtering and de-blocking. The bitstream parsing and bitstream generation are also accelerated, which allows the Mali-VE IP to handle very high bitrates with low power consumption. For encode, all motion search is handled by dedicated hardware. The search scheme is performed hierarchically and the resulting motion vectors are in quarter-pel resolution, in the range of plus/minus 64-pixels. This allows the video engine to produce video streams with very good quality – even up to full HD resolution.

All control of the video engine is carried out by firmware running on a set of small embedded microcontrollers internal to the Mali-VE IP. This allows the Mali-VE3 and Mali-VE6 video engines to be flexible in terms of multi-codec support and error concealment, and also allows future standards to be supported with only a firmware upgrade. The interface to the host system is kept simple by using AMBA 3 AXI and a single interrupt source for event signalling to the host.