ATI's Avivo Platform - H.264 Decode and Transcode Acceleration on R5xx

Over two years ago, Intel introduced the world to their first platform brand - Centrino. And just at this past IDF, Intel announced their second platform brand - Viiv. Both Centrino and Viiv had their reasons for being created; they had their overall goals. Centrino was brought forth to improve the mobile platform by extending battery life and make wireless networking ubiquitous. Intel's Viiv was created to address the growing segment of users interested in media PCs, to improve the overall media experience on the PC through better performance, more CE-like operation, and guaranteed connectivity to CE devices. It is also tough to ignore the fact that Centrino and shortly, Viiv, were both created to be tremendously profitable and keep the competition away from the pie.

Like school children, technology companies are very easily influenced by one another. Intel kicked off their Centrino brand in March of 2003 and made it highly successful, exciting envy and a desire to attain the same in competitors and other tech companies around the globe. AMD tried their hand at platform branding with the Turion 64 mobile platform, and today, we're here to talk about ATI's first video platform - Avivo.

Much like Intel's Centrino and Viiv, Avivo is a reference to a platform, and as such, it doesn't refer to just one product, but in this case, two. A complete Avivo platform features an Avivo capture card, and an Avivo graphics card. As of today, the only Avivo capture card available is the ATI Theater 550, and presently, there are no Avivo graphics cards available. The next-generation of GPUs from ATI (R520, RV530 and RV515) will all support Avivo, and thus, they make up the second half of the platform.

What is Avivo's reason for existing? According to ATI, Avivo exists to address the future of displaying digital pictures and video on the PC, and to put it more succinctly, it strives to perfect the "Video Pipeline". So, while Intel's Centrino focused on perfecting mobility, and Viiv will attempt to perfect the media center PC, Avivo aims to do the same for the capture, encoding, decoding, processing and display of video. ATI calls these five areas that Avivo will improve: stages of the "video pipeline".

The first stage of that pipeline happens to be video capture.