VideoCore
low-power mobile multimedia processor
VideoCore is a series of low-power mobile multimedia processors originally developed by Alphamosaic Ltd and now owned by Broadcom. Alphamosaic marketed its first version as a two-dimensional DSP architecture that makes it flexible and efficient enough to decode (as well as encode) a number of multimedia codecs in software while maintaining low power usage. The semiconductor intellectual property core (SIP core) has been found so far only on Broadcom SoCs.
Technical details
Multimedia system constraints
Mobile multimedia devices require a lot of high-speed video processing but at low power for long battery life. The ARM processor core has a high IPS per watt figure (and thus dominates the mobile phone market) but requires video acceleration coprocessors and display controllers for a complete system. The amount of data passing between these chips at high speed results in higher power consumption.
Specialised co-processors may be optimised for throughput over latency (more cores and data parallelism, but at a lower clock speed) and have instruction-sets and memory architectures designed for media processing (e.g. saturation arithmetic, and handling of specialised data formats).
3D engine
The VideoCoreIV-AG100-R found in the Raspberry Pi 1, 2 and 3, is documented to fully support OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenVG 1.1.
The 3D engine is composed of various subsystems, the most abundant being the QPUs.
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This entry incorporates text from “VideoCore” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.