Sony Bloggie

Last CES I dropped by Ambarella where they had just announced their iOne smart camera SoC. Ambarella is a big player in the camera and encoder ASIC business, and the importance of adding high-end ISP and video encoding as smartphone cameras become a very important topic. On one hand, we have smartphones increasingly becoming the camera of choice, and on the other, cameras becoming increasingly smartphone-like. As a refresher, the iOne consists of two Cortex A9s, an ARM 11 for camera management, and PowerVR SGX 540 graphics, alongside Full HD 1080i60 encode/decode. The promise last year was to combine Android or Linux alongside some of the traditional camera DSP for a big jump in quality. This year Ambarella showed off a number of products including...