Texas Instruments Offers 8-Core Multimedia Solution

While processing units for personal computers are well enough known, media servers and video conferencing or broadcasting equipment also needs to stay up to date, and Texas Instruments claims to have created a solution meant for infrastructure applications.

Texas Instruments has a certain little digital signal processor (DSP for short) known as TMS320C6678.

This particular chip has a frequency of 1.25 GHz and has now been used in its maker's newest solution intended for multimedia gateways, IMS media servers, video broadcast equipment and video conferencing servers.

Dubbed C6678, it has eight of the aforementioned TMS320C6678 cores and has other benefits, like 160 GFLOPs of combined fixed- and floating-point performance on a single device, plus 320 GMACs.

The C6678 has support for quite a few video encoders and decoders, like VC1, Soren Spark, MPEG2, JPEG, MPEG4, H.264 and H.263.

The list of audio encoders/decoders is just as sizable, being composed of AAC, AACv2, AC3, MP3, WMA8 and WMA9.

"There is no other DSP in the industry that can support all of the key features needed for the development of high density and high quality multimedia infrastructure products in one device, like ours," said Brian Glinsman, general manager of TI's communications infrastructure business.

"Our C6678 based multimedia solution delivers superior levels of performance coupled with improved channel density, providing customers with the right tools, software and support to help accelerate their designs to market."

Texas Instruments' customers will be able to set up multimedia infrastructure products with greater channel densities and lower power levels and at lower prices, not just thanks to the C6678 itself, but also to the multicore software developer's kit (MC-SDK).

Designers can start developing on it with the low-cost TMDXEVM6678L evaluation module (EVM) for the price of $399. The C6678 DSP starts at $169 (for 1Ku) and, along with the EVM, can already be ordered. The suite of codecs and ecosystem solutions will be completed by March.