So why is Blackfin well suited for A/V applications? Blackfin offers multimedia grade performance. This means a couple things; one is that it offers very high clock speeds, up to 600MHz and beyond, and this allows for real time computation that allows for video compression with high resolution formats, multiple formats being supported with video and audio streams. Coupled with that is a flexible instruction set that allows very complex and efficient operations to be performed on every clock cycle. Then there’s the powerful connectivity and data handling side of things where the direct memory access controller, the DMA controller, of Blackfin is completely decoupled from the processor core, which means that it can be moving data very rapidly without bothering the core while it’s doing its processing. On the connectivity side, the peripheral mix is very important to be able to connect these to the external world. Blackfin needs and has a rich peripheral set. Finally, scalability is key. Scalability not only across applications, but within applications. Dynamic power management is one of the fundamental pillars of Blackfin. Within an application it allows for voltage and frequency scaling to the point where the application needs it such that voltage, frequency or both, can be dialed down if an application does not need that level of performance at a certain time. In a global sense, the wide product portfolio of Blackfin allows everything from the lower end, 300MHz single core processor all the way up through dual core processors with each core having 600MHz performance. There is a huge range of performance scalability in that window, and this allows for not only feature enhancements for existing systems, but also the ability to rightsize the processor to fit the application.