Ambric has revealed plans to showcase its Am2045 GT (pre-release version) on the Mac at NAB 2008. This year's conference, missing Apple themselves, will see the video reference platform in action, which is said to allow video professionals to accelerate HD MPEG-2 and HD H.264 encoding for distribution on Blu-ray, Flash, and DVD. Am2045 GT also boosts Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 and After Effects CS3 using a plug-in.

Let's see what this video processing reference platform is all about, shall we? First of all, you've got initial support for MPEG-2 acceleration and H.264/AVC acceleration up to High Profile – with more formats to come, say the guys at Ambric. What this means is that your processor will be considerably exempt from workload, when watching a Blu-ray movie, for instance.

Ambric's Video Processing Reference Platform also runs cooler, according to the fabless semiconductor company based in Beaverton, Oregon. They say it uses less than 10% of the power consumption, seen with high-end 3D-graphics cards. Am2045 GT also emanates 10 percent less heat than kick-ass cards. Generally, powerful 3D graphics cards use up a lot of power, plus they require 8-pin additional power source.

Am2045 GT's host software transcoding application sports 10+ decoders including pro camera formats, plus job automation, specifically targeting video professionals. This feature alone is strongly connected to the hardware decoder.

Apple themselves announced back in February that they would not have a booth at The NAB Show this year, with speculation increasing after Avid Technology (Apple's main competitor at the NAB Show) dropped out late last year, according to a TVTechnology.com piece.

An Apple spokesman confirmed that the Cupertino folks were cutting down on overall trade show participation: "Apple is participating in fewer trade shows this year," said Anuj Nayar, senior manager of PR at Apple. "Often there are better ways to reach our customers. The increasing popularity of our retail stores and Apple.com Web site allows us to directly reach more than 100 million customers around the world in innovative new ways."

Ambric will be featuring its stuff starting Monday, April 14th, and ending on the 17th, at booth SU13213 in the Upper South Hall.