3Dlabs today revealed that it is spinning out from under Creative Labs after over four years ownership and is now independently sampling its media processor technology to system designers.

“Creative has approved the spinout and feels it is the best solution for its shareholders, and we are now talking to potential investors as we move back to our roots of being a fabless chip company. We hope the transaction will be completed by next April,” Hock Leow, president of 3Dlabs told EE Times.

Its first effort being freshly independent is the announcement of its DMS-02 multi-core media processor capable of HD 720p H.264 video playback on a handheld device.

The DMS-02 incorporates 24 floating-point processing elements, dual ARM 926EJ cores, multi-level caches, three bi-directional video stream ports, 32 or 64-bit mobile memory for up to 1.6 GBytes/s bandwidth and peripheral interfaces to LCDs, CMOS sensors, IDE disks, USB OTG, Flash memory and Audio DACs. The device is OS independent with the first SDK supporting embedded Linux 2.6.

The processor supports a number of codecs and APIs, including H.264, MP3, AAC, JPEG and OpenGL ES, and may be used in handhelds, navigation systems, video conferencing, in-car entertainment, video surveillance and cell phones.

“Our engineering teams were asked to deliver a breakthrough in handheld media processing and the DMS-02 shows we have achieved just that,” said Hock Leow. “The ability to play back a full 720p resolution H.264 video on your HDTV from a portable device consuming less than 1 Watt is an incredible achievement. Combine that with rendering 3D navigation at 30 fps, capturing and encoding H.264 video at D1 and performing 4.8 GFLOPS of compute and you have a real testament to the architecture. We believe this architecture has the ability to scale and address the rich digital media content that consumers are constantly demanding in low powered mobile devices.”