Brian's Brain

Jul 15 2008 1:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |
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My contacts at Analog Devices recently sent me a multiple-slivers-of-ADI-silicon-inclusive Yamaha RX-V563 A/V receiver to test-drive. I haven't yet fired it up; I'm particularly curious to eval a few particular features, listed in no particular order below (hit the links to see why):

• 2-input/1-output HDMI switching
• The Compressed Music Enhancer
• YPAO Automatic System Calibration
• Neural Audio's matrix surround encoding technology
• Silent Cinema (headphones) and Virtual Cinema DSP virtual surround synthesis
• Sirius-ready (for an optional satellite radio tuner add-on)
• Bluetooth A2DP streaming support (again, via an optional add-on)

Based solely on ADI press release and Yamaha website perusal, however, a number of interesting (at least to me) factoids emerge. Sound off in the comments on any (or all) of the observations that follow, please!

• I'm pleasantly surprised to see ADI in a Yamaha design. It was my understanding (which an ADI contact tentatively confirmed) that Yamaha has historically used internally developed DSPs and other ICs in its home theater gear.
• I'm also surprised to see ADI's Blackfin DSP technology inside the RX-V563, versus SHARC, which historically has seen use by AVR manufacturers, albeit in high-end units. The words 'high-end' are key, I suspect, and are the core motivation for this post's title. One ADI contact commented, when I asked for definitive confirmation of Blackfin-not-SHARC, "SHARC could, of course, do the decoding without breaking a sweat, but they needed a microcontroller as well as decoding, and wanted to keep the price down." With the DSP cores integrated within multi-function ICs growing increasingly powerful courtesy of Moore's Law trends, I wonder to what degree this burgeoning capability will lead to attrition in the overall size (measured both by unit sales and revenue) of the standalone DSP IC market over time.
• Yamaha's product family page actually lists five new AVRs, not just the two mentioned in ADI's press release. At the moment, my ADI contacts aren't positive whether or not the company's Blackfin processor is in the three incremental units, but in the words of one of the company representatives last Wednesday, "early word is that we are not in those units at this time." Why, I wonder? It'd seem most likely to me that Yamaha would develop a common hardware platform across all model variants, which it'd feature set differentiate on a per-model basis primarily via firmware. However, considering that the two high-end models (the RX-V663 and RX-V863) list features such as 7.2 channel audio (why someone would care about having two discrete subwoofer outputs frankly escapes me) and HD Audio format (i.e. Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital TrueHD, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio and DTS-HD Master Audio) support, I suspect that Blackfin doesn't (yet) have sufficient 'muscle' to handle the decoding and other processing functions associated with these high-end codecs. And conversely, Blackfin may be overkill, from both performance and price standpoints, for Yamaha's low-end RX-V363 model.
• In closing, I'll commend ADI on the degree to which it's made Blackfin a market success. The chips' DSP core derives from a joint technology development project (known as MSA, for Micro Signal Architecture) that Analog Devices and Intel embarked on at the beginning of the decade. Intel, to the best of my knowledge, has never used MSA in a production device; I suspect that the XScale product line sale to Marvell two years ago abruptly terminated Intel's MSA integration plans. ADI, clearly, has been comparatively more successful in pushing MSA into the marketplace, thereby incurring a return on its development costs.