Au1200When it was
rolled out by AMD in January of 2005, the Alchemy Au1200 was described as a MIPS32-based SoC featuring hardware acceleration for MPEG, DivX, H.263, and WMV9. According to RMI, the Au1200 supports fast media downloads and high-quality video "efficiently delivered" at full-frame rates, with low-power consumption. The chip's integrated Media Acceleration Engine is claimed capable of decoding DivX media files with up to D1 resolution at 30 frames per second.
The highly integrated SoC features a MIPS32 core with 16KB each of instruction and data cache, along with a plethora of on-chip peripheral interfaces, including IDE, dual-UARTs, USB 2.0, GPIO, an SDIO/MMC card interface, AC'97 audio, and more.
Au1200 block diagramDivXDivX has developed what it claims is "the world's most popular video compression technology." The company says its codec can compress the entire contents of a DVD to fit on a data CD with "virtually no loss in quality." That level of compression also makes DivX video easily transportable over the Internet.
DivX offers a free Windows video codec and player as well as a "Pro" version for $20. The company also licenses its technology to consumer electronics manufacturers for use in devices such as portable multimedia players (PMPs), DVD players, personal video recorders (PVRs), and digital cameras. DivX claims that over 46 million DivX Certified hardware devices from a variety of manufacturers have been shipped worldwide.
The Alchemy hot potatoThe Alchemy MIPS RISC processor family has had an interesting history. It was originally developed by Alchemy Semiconductor, which was
acquired in 2002 by AMD. AMD
introduced the MIPS32-based Au1200 in early 2005. This past summer, AMD
sold the Alchemy line to RMI.
AvailabilityRMI offers DivX decode support as part of Au1200 SDKs (software development kits) that target both Windows CE and Linux.
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