dicas, the German MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 specialist, has just started to develop an HD encoder for Cell processor platforms in collaboration with IBM. The objective of the technological co-operation is to bring together one of the most powerful video codecs, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, with one of the most powerful currently available microprocessors, the Cell B.E. chip, for professional broadcast applications.Initially designed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM for the extreme processing demands of the PlayStation3, the Cell chip has rapidly gained in importance for a large number of further graphic-intensive applications. "Its revolutionary architecture makes the Cell chip a great deal for video encoding" says Philipp Kraetzer, managing director at dicas. Due to eight independent processing cores the Cell is claimed to be more than 10 times faster than any current PC processor. "It's a very interesting challenge to divide the H.264 encoding algorithms across the Cell's processing cores", Kraetzer continues
"Utilizing the Cell's mighty processing power makes broadcast-quality HD encoding and even 1080p in real-time possible" says Klaas Schuur, co-founder of dicas. "dicas has gained considerable expertise in porting the H.264 codec to various platforms. The combination of Cell and H.264 is a convincing answer to the requirements of broadcasters and IPTV content providers in the age of HDTV."
The launch of the HD encoder for Cell is scheduled for the second quarter of 2009.
