Why do Codec Engine applications out of the box consume so much memory?
The DaVinci EVM board comes with 256MB of external memory installed (the maximum amount currently addressable by the part). All the out-of-the-box software (DSP codecs and ARM-side apps) is spread out over all of that space for developer’s comfort. This way you don’t have to worry about running out of space when allocating buffers or creating memory-hungry instances of video-processing algorithms. However, since production platforms based on the DM6446 processor will likely be made with less than 256MB of external memory available, the developer must be able to shrink the memory used by his applications to whatever his target platform provides. There is a separate article with more details on the memory map employed by the Codec Engine Examples.
