Advantech (News - Alert), a global manufacturer of telecom computing blades and multi-core processor platforms, launched its DSPC-8681 Multimedia Processing Engine (MPE) at the NAB Show 2011. The DSPC-8681 MPE is an add-in card that integrates four Texas InstrumentsTMS320C6678 multicore digital signal processors (DSPs), the PLX ExpressLane PEX8624 PCIe switch, and the Xilinx (News - Alert) XC3S200AN Spartan-3 FPGA in order to achieve the highest video performance level in a half-length PCIe form factor.

The MPE has been designed for applications in digital media, test and measurement, communications, DSP farms, mission critical, high performance computing, medical imaging and industrial automation markets. Advantech will be showcasing a broad range of multi-core platform solutions at the NAB Show in Booth SU 10417, South Hall Upper, through April 14, in the Las Vegas Convention Center.

In a release, the vice president of Embedded Media and Smart Technology Group (EMST) for Advantech, RT Lu, said, “The last year has shown a dramatic increase in the demand for high-quality, real-time video processing in multiple markets. To keep up with demand, OEMs designing solutions based on mainstream commercial and industrial servers need the highest performing video processing technology on fast-to-deploy PCIe add-in cards. We designed the DSPC-8681 Multimedia Processing Engine to speed their time-to-market, with 32 DSP cores today scaling to 64 cores later this quarter.”

Lu continued, “At NAB we are focused on OEMs working on the creation, management, distribution and delivery of digital media and exciting applications such as 3D video, interactive TV, digital signage and evolving technologies for streaming HD video delivery. The DSPC-8681 is designed specifically to enable delivery of any content to any user and at the same time maintain high utilization and efficiency of the hardware resources. We also believe that the DSPC-8681 is a perfect fit for applications in many other industries such as video-surveillance, medical, bioinformatics, radar, sonar and instrumentation. The card, when coupled with a general purpose processor platform, also provides unsurpassed fixed and floating point performance, making it unique in its genre.”

Advantech’s new DSPC-8681 Multimedia Processing Engine (MPE) add-in card has been designed to deliver 40GHz of cumulative DSP power, which enables high performance, multi-format applications including video transcoding, rate adaption and multiparty video.

The DSPC-8681 essentially includes Serial RapidIO (News - Alert) and 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet daisy-chains which connects all the DSP devices and provides industry-leading performance as well as supports a wide range of voice, audio and video codecs. The DSPC-8681 card can support 120 channels in a H.264 mobile video application, and 60 channels in a content delivery network using H.264. The card can also support four channels for HD Broadcast applications.