The Storm-1 SP8LP is designed for power- and price-sensitive applications that need the flexibility of software programmability, such as professional grade video surveillance and analytics systems, video conferencing and prosumer camcorders.

According to Stream Processors, list price for the SP8LP in low volume is $29 compared with Texas Instruments' DaVinci 6446, which costs approximately $34.

The Storm-1 SP8LP delivers programmable performance of 16,000 MMACs (million multiplications and accumulations per second) while consuming less than 0.1 milliwatt per MMAC. A single Storm-1 SP8LP is capable of real-time multi-codec/multi-stream encoding such as H.264 scalable video coding (SVC) while still having enough processing headroom to run robust rules-based video analytics, advanced image sensor processing and audio encoding.

The Storm-1 SP8LP employs the company's SPI stream processor architecture. The device features a MIPS32 4KEc CPU core for system tasks, a DSP coprocessor subsystem that contains a second MIPS32 4KEc CPU core and a high-performance data-parallel unit (DPU) with eight lanes that have five 32-bit arithmetic logic units (ALUs) each. Each ALU contains a MAC unit and is capable of four 8-, two 16- or one 32-bit operation per cycle.

Input and output data for each lane is managed by the compiler and on chip logic to maximize data bandwidth and simplify programming by eliminating the need to manually manage cache or direct memory access (DMA). A rich set of I/O includes Ethernet, PCI, I2C, I2S, UARTs, GPIO, image sensor interface and BT.656/BT.1120 video ports.

The chip is housed in a 23 x 23 mm, 480-pin, plastic ball grid array (PBGA) and is implemented in 130 nm 1.0-volt standard CMOS process.

SPI's IP camera reference platform is designed to assist evaluation and speed the development of IP camera designs based on the Storm-1 SP8LP. The reference platform consists of a hardware board with a high-resolution CMOS sensor interface, composite video input and a standard Ethernet connection. The platform also offers a software development kit (SDK), which includes a H.264 encoder application library, a plug-and-play media streaming framework, and a Linux environment with drivers, webserver and a RTSP stack.

Pricing: The Storm-1 IP Camera Reference Platform is currently shipping and is available at a price of $4,995. High-volume pricing information for the SP8LP device is available on request. The SP8LP in low volume is $29.
Availability: Storm-1 SP8LP is sampling with full production expected in the third quarter of 2007.

Stream Processors Inc., 1-408-616-3338, www.streamprocessors.com