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ARC produces extra-efficient MP3 decoder

24 November 2007 15:43 by James "Dela" Delahunty | 1 comment

ARC International, based in the UK, announced an optimized MP3 decoder for its ARC Sound Subsystem which operates at an impressively low 7 MHz and dissipates less than 0.46 mW of power in a TSMC 90 G process. The next best competitive product required over 20% more power when performing MP3 decode than the new MP3 decoder. "ARC's ongoing investment in software technologies has allowed us to move aggressively to offer highly optimized media codecs including this latest MP3 decoder," said Derek Meyer, chief operating officer of ARC International.

He added: "This advanced level of software optimization and resulting power reduction is a result of our acquisition of Alarity Corporation: the multimedia company with a reputation for leading edge codec software, firmware, and advanced multimedia technologies. This new MP3 decoder for the ARC Sound Subsystem is an example of their world class expertise."

In a recently published research report, Informa Plc estimated that the number of handsets sold with music capabilities would increase 69 percent from 154 million in 2006 to 260 million in 2007. The London-based firm predicted that by 2012, the music phone segment would grow to more than one billion new unit sales.

"Developing an MP3 decoder or any other multimedia codec for ARC CPU cores and subsystems is greatly enhanced by inherent configurability," said Felix Litvinsky, vice president of business development at ARC and former CEO of Alarity. "Before ARC invented the configurable processor architecture, software developers were confined by a fixed instruction set. Now, programmers can profile code to identify execution bottlenecks and add an instruction that vastly accelerates code performance thus freeing them to create optimized software on optimized hardware."

Source:
Press Release

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