Overview

For the purposes of VP8 (WebM Video) decoding and encoding, ARM based System on a Chip (SoC) hardware falls into three broad categories, systems without NEON (also called Advanced SIMD extensions, Media Processing Engine or MPE), systems with NEON and systems with dedicated VP8 support.

Systems without NEON

Systems without NEON will perform poorly for encoding and decoding VP8 video both in terms of speed and power usage. These systems often provide hardware support for other codecs (e.g. h.264) and will perform much better using these codecs than when using VP8.

Systems with NEON

The official libvpx software can take advantage of the NEON extensions on ARM based systems, if available, to greatly improve encoding and decoding performance both in terms of speed and power usage as compared to systems without NEON. In general a SoC with NEON extensions can be expected to preform decoding and encoding at least twice as fast as a similar CPU without NEON.

Systems with dedicated VP8 support

Some SoC manufactures have decided to add support for VP8 decoding (and in some cases encoding) directly to their SoC. In theory these systems should out perform systems without dedicated VP8 hardware both in terms of speed and power usage. A benchmark on the Rockchip RK2918 SoC showing the benefits of hardware VP8 decoding is available on the WebM Blog.

Common ARM SoC VP8 support table

Developer	Name	Core	NEON	VP8 Decode	VP8 Encode	Link
Allwinner	A1x	Cortex-A8	Yes	Yes	No
Allwinner	A20	Dual Cortex-A7	Yes	Yes	No
Allwinner	A31	Quad Cortex-A7	Yes	Yes	No
Amlogic	AML8726-M	Cortex-A9	Yes	?	?
Apple Inc.	A5	Cortex-A9	Yes	No	No
Apple Inc.	A5X	Cortex-A9	Yes	No	No
Broadcom	BCM2835	ARM11	?	Yes	No
Broadcom	BCM2763	ARM11	?	Yes	No
Freescale Semiconductor	i.MX6	Cortex-A9	Yes	Yes	No
Huawei	K3V2	Cortex-A9	Yes	Yes	?
Marvell	Armada 1xxx	?	?	Yes	?
Marvell	ARMADA PXA2128	?	Yes	?	?
nVidia	Tegra 2	Cortex-A9	No	No	No
nVidia	Tegra 3	Cortex-A9	Yes	?	?
nVidia	Tegra 4	Cortex-A15	Yes	Yes	Yes	techreport.com
Qualcomm	Snapdragon S1	Scorpion	Yes	No	No
Qualcomm	Snapdragon S2	?	?	No	No
Qualcomm	Snapdragon S3	?	?	No	No
Qualcomm	Snapdragon S4	?	?	No	No
Rockchip	RK29xx	Cortex-A8	Yes	Yes	No
Rockchip	RK30xx	?	Yes	Yes	Yes
Samsung	Exynos 3110	Cortex-A8	?	No	No
Samsung	Exynos 4210	Cortex-A9	Yes	No	No
Samsung	Exynos 5 Dual 5250	Cortex A15	Yes	Yes	No
Silicon Integrated Systems	SiS9610	?	?	Yes	?
STMicroelectronics	SPEAr1340	Dual Cortex A9	No	Yes	No
ST-Ericsson	Nova A9500	Cortex-A9	Yes	No	No
ST-Ericsson	Nova A9600	Dual Cortex-A15	Yes	?	?
ST-Ericsson	NovaThor U8500	Cortex-A9	Yes	No	No
ST-Ericsson	NovaThor U9500	Cortex-A9	Yes	No	No
ST-Ericsson	NovaThor LT9540	Cortex-A9	?	Yes	Yes
Sony	PlayStation Vita	Cortex-A9	Yes	No	No
Texas Instruments	OMAP3 Series	Cortex-A8	No	No	No
Texas Instruments	OMAP4 Series	Cortex-A9	Yes	?	No
Texas Instruments	OMAP5 Series	Cortex-A9	Yes	Yes	No
ZiiLABS	ZMS-20	Cortex-A9	Yes	Yes	No
ZiiLABS	ZMS-40	Cortex-A9	Yes	Yes	No