Ambric in Beaverton, Oregon has announced its massively parallel Am2045 GT platform consisting of 336 RISC processors on a single chip and integrated into a PCI Express card for Mac OS X Leopard and Windows XP. The technology and interfaces are used to accelerate MPEG video processing to levels well beyond the fastest quad-core CPUs and is designed for video professionals and prosumers On Tuesday, Adobe endorsed the platform and jointly announced transparent integration into Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 and Adobe After Effects CS3.

"[This product] opens up professional, high-definition, accelerated video processing to hundreds of thousands of professional and prosumer video editors because they can equip their personal computers to speed up HD MPEG-2 and even HD H.264 High Profile encoding by as much as eight times software-only encoding," Ambric said.

Ambric Am2045 GT Platform

"Adobe is world-leading both as a video software developer and as a provider of integration technology and support to their technology partners," said Jay Eisenlohr, co-founder and executive vice president of marketing and business development, Ambric. "We are very pleased that Adobe has endorsed our integration with Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium."

The Ambric semi-custom ASIC chip was specially designed to combine the massively parallel power of 336 pure RISC processor on a single chip. The new platform places that chip on a PCI Express card and provides a software interface designed to accelerate up to 1080i video, currently limited only by the software. 1080p60, 2K, and 4K processing are are potentials for the future given the horsepower of the silicon. The platform is also reprogrammable, so it enables easy upgrades in the field to add new compression standards and video effects acceleration.

Ambric’s chips were chosen by ADS Tech and Sorenson Media for their programmability, their 1.2 trillion operations-per-second performance, and their very low power consumption, Ambric said. The Am2045 GT uses only 15 watts of power while delivering video processing throughput equivalent to four quad-core CPUs. It is easier to install and compatible with a broad range of PCI Express-based computers.

The Ambric reference platform will first be available as a complete product for end-users from Ambric’s OEMs including Pyro AV, the broadcast division of ADS Tech, Inc, as well as Sorenson Media, and will be demonstrated at Pyro AVis booth S-2734 at Macworld Expo next week.