Samplify's APAX Technology Cuts Memory Power Consumption by 59% During Video Playback on Mobile Devices

CAMPBELL, Calif., May 31, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Samplify, the leading intellectual property company for accelerating memory, storage, and I/O bottlenecks in mobile devices, consumer electronics, and computing,  announces that it has completed testing of its APAX technology with an H.264 decoder to reduce the power consumption of the memory subsystem of mobile devices during video playback.  Testing results prove a 59% reduction in power consumption for memory during video playback on mobile devices and an extension of mobile battery life by 15% to 25% for all multimedia data types.  The company will showcase these dramatic results next week at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Austin, Texas, June 2-6.

This milestone marks the completion of all multimedia use cases within mobile processors including:

• Image sensor acquisition in Bayer Matrix format
• Image processing and color space conversion (RGB 4:4:4, YUV 4:4:4)
• Motion estimation (ME) during video encoding (YUV 4:2:2/4:2:0)
• Motion compensation (MC) during video decoding (YUV 4:2:2/4:2:0)
• On-screen display and 3D graphics (RGB 4:4:4, RGBA 4:4:4:4, triangle vertices, meshes)
• Transparent software processing of APAX-encoded image data, flexibly accessed either as macroblocks or as rasters.

"Reducing memory bandwidth on mobile devices during H.264 decoding is the key to reducing power consumption and extending battery life during video playback," says Al Wegener, CTO and Founder of Samplify.  "We have proven not only that APAX encoding and decoding can be applied to reference frames as they are written to, and read from, external DDR memory, but that we can control the drift between the encoder and decoder with negligible impact to image quality."

Samplify at DAC
Samplify will be exhibiting at the ARM Connected Community® Pavilion in Booth 921, Pod 1B, at DAC.  The company will also detail its testing results in the ARM Connected Community® Theatre on Tuesday,   June 4, at 2:15 PM in a presentation entitled, "Reducing Memory Bandwidth and Power in Mobile Devices through Numerical Encoding for Multimedia."

About APAX
Samplify APAX technology is a universal numerical encoder that operates on any multimedia or numerical datatype.  APAX achieves typical encoding rates of 3:1 to 8:1 without affecting the quality of results.  The APAX Verilog IP core for SoCs and ASICs synthesizes to 0.08 mm² in TSMC 28nm HPM, while consuming one-tenth the power of a LP-DDR3 interface.

About Samplify:
Samplify is a Silicon Valley startup providing the only software and hardware numerical and multimedia encoder that reduces memory, I/O, and storage bottlenecks in mobile, consumer electronic, and computing devices.  Samplify is a privately-held company based in Silicon Valley, with funding from Charles River Ventures and Formative Ventures and strategic investors Schlumberger, Mamiya, and IDT.

ARM Connected Community® is a registered trademark of ARM LTD.

SOURCE Samplify