Almalence Ports Optimized Image Processing Software Onto Tensilica's New IVP Imaging/Video DSP

Almalence has significant expertise in the algorithms that bridge the gap between mobile phones and high-end cameras, providing blur and noise free photos in low light, high quality digital zoom, and high dynamic range image capture, stated Gary Brown, Tensilica's director of imaging/video. Their software will be very attractive to the mobile imaging device makers adopting our IVP imaging/video DSP.

We were impressed with the ease of porting and optimizing our application to Tensilica's IVP, stated Eugene Panich, CEO, Almalence. Tensilica's compiler helped us achieve high performance and is among the best we've ever used. And the quality of their entire toolset was noticeable.

IVP is an imaging and video dataplane processor that is ideal for the complex image, video and gesture recognition signal processing functions in mobile handsets, tablets, digital televisions, automotive, video games and computer vision. The IVP DSP has a unique instruction set tuned for imaging and video pixel processing that gives it an instruction throughput of over 16x the number of 16-bit pixel operations compared to that of the typical host CPU with single-issue vector instructions.

In addition to its raw instruction throughput advantage to host CPUs, the imaging specific compound instructions supported by IVP give it a higher peak performance of 10 to 20x and much higher energy efficiency. IVP's rich instruction set has more than 300 imaging, video and vision-oriented vector operations, each of which applies to 32 or more 16-bit pixels per cycle.