Khronos Group Announces New OpenMAX Open Standard for Enabling Effective Media Acceleration

Semiconductor and software leaders including ARM, Motorola, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments found new Khronos Working Group and invite open industry participation

July 6, 2004 – EXPO COMM WIRELESS JAPAN – The Khronos™ Group today announced the formation of the new OpenMAX™ working group to define a royalty-free, cross-platform API (application programming interface) that standardizes access to multimedia processing primitives used extensively in video codecs such as MPEG-4, audio and image codecs, and 2D and 3D graphics. The OpenMAX API will enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full potential of new silicon – regardless of the underlying hardware architecture. The early availability of optimized media libraries on a new processor in turn encourages a rich variety of media content to be rapidly available on that platform.

The OpenMAX working group was originally founded and promoted by a number of leading Khronos Members including ARM (LSE:ARM); (NASDAQ: ARMHY), Motorola (NASDAQ: MOT), Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (LSE:(GDR): SSNHY, KSE: 005930.KS), STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) and Texas Instruments (NASDAQ: TXN). The initial work undertaken by these companies is now available, under the formal Khronos Group participation framework, to any Khronos member who wishes to participate in the OpenMAX working group. http://www.khronos.org/openmax/

The Khronos Group has successfully developed market-driving open standard graphics and multimedia APIs since 2000. Today, in addition to the announcement of OpenMAX, Khronos also announced the formation of a second new API: the OpenVGâ„¢ initiative to provide a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG on handheld devices. Khronos invites any company with interest to