Ambarella
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Wearable Google Helpouts streaming camera shares GoPro heritage, we go hands-on (video)
Ambarella isn't exactly a household name, but the 10-year-old company's silicon has long found its way into GoPro cams and other hardware thanks to its video-compression chops and low-power tech prowess. Word broke last month that Google commissioned the outfit to produce a reference design for a wearable camera that would stream to its Helpouts service, which lets folks ask experts for help over video. Here at CES, the manufacturer's brought along a few samples of the device, and we've just put our paws all over one. Inside a plastic housing the size of a chunky matchbox, Ambarella's placed a custom chip (an A7LW, if you're curious) that endows the package with the ability to stream 1080p video at 30fps for a minimum of one hour. The housing also comes with a micro-USB port, microphone, 500mAh battery, 8GB of flash storage, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, along with power and "connect" buttons up top.
Ambarella's Cortex A9-based iOne is the smartphone processor of your dreams... but it's for your camera
You may not have heard of Ambarella factoring into the smartphone processor race alongside Qualcomm, TI, and Samsung, and there's a good reason for that: they don't do smartphone processors. Rather, these guys are in the business of making video and photographic processing chips, and their latest -- the iOne -- is a doozy. Starting with a dual-core Cortex-A9 at 1GHz, the iOne adds in an extra ARM11 core at 533MHz dedicated to handling camera functions and ensuring ready times of under one second. It's capable of real-time encode and decode of H.264 1080p video content at 30fps and includes a GPU that can run OpenGL ES 2.0 for what we can only assume would be the wildest camera UI you've ever seen. What kind of beastly point-and-shoot is this, anyway? Well, Ambarella envisions cameras running Android before too long, and when you think about it, the hardware difference between a smartphone and a digital camera is getting smaller by the day -- so it would make sense that this iOne sounds so much like something we'd like to have powering our handsets. We can dream, can't we? Follow the break for the press release.
