Ambarella has just announced iOne, a multimedia system on a chip (SoC) with several ARM cores and associated media co-processors. A first glance, it doesn’t sound unusual in our gadget world – many smartphones do use (or plan to) this type of hardware, but when Ambarella said that iOne was to be used in digital cameras, they got our attention, and this could change the camera landscape in dramatic ways.
Not only iOne is powerful enough to encode two 1080 video stream simultaneously, it can process images with complex algorithms to improve the visual quality. Interestingly, it also have a graphics processor that’s capable of 3D graphics – wouldn’t that be cool for a fancy user-interface?
But the most interesting aspect of all, is how programmable it is. Even today, most cameras use fixed-function hardware that typically have a better performance/cost ratio, which slows the arrival of new imaging effects and techniques. With a totally programmable imaging chip, what if you could download filters and even apps onto your camera? We’re not there yet, but Ambarella might have done a giant step for cameras.
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