CAL Speeds PDL Processing

We are excited to announce that with the latest commercial release of Ghostscript, Artifex is including a new component, the Cobalt Acceleration Library, or CAL for short.

Advancements in embedded processing power have continued to push the boundaries of both printer and MFP performance. With the proliferation of complex visual elements such as transparency, gradients, and color-calibrated high-resolution images, optimizing performance is critical in the use of image scanning and printing applications. Regardless of the scan and print hardware technology used, there are a number of computationally expensive operations that typically occur within the rendering pipeline of an MFP. The Cobalt Acceleration Library optimizes and improves these functions.

CAL contains optimized routines for certain common graphical operations. When a version of Ghostscript is built with CAL, these routines are seamlessly called to accelerate the page generation, resulting in faster output without loss of quality.

CAL makes uses of the SIMD features present in modern processors to perform operations faster than would otherwise be possible. Currently, supported processor architectures include x86/x64 (where SSE and AVX2 instructions are used), and ARM (where NEON is used).

Artifex has identified critical performance areas of PDL processing to optimize: halftone screening, scaling, transparency blending, and color conversion. We have seen significant benefits from reimplementing these algorithms using SIMD instructions. The new implementation results in notable speed increases for industry-standard PDF test files needed for AirPrint conformance.

CAL is portable and will run on minimal real-time operating systems, embedded Linux, UNIX, Window and OS X. Please visit the CAL page for additional information.