Abstract: For low cost and low power portable mobile applications, a unique intra prediction architecture for H.264/AVC and AVS dual-mode decoder is proposed based on the idea of programmability. By analyzing the similarity of the data path of different prediction modes in H.264/AVC and AVS, a specific programmable core with customized 8 bit microcode set and efficient data path is implemented. It contains only one 16-bit accumulator and one 16-bit barrel shifter. Implementation results show that the total gates count is only about 6.3K under 0.18 μm process, and the circuit can process real-time H.264/AVC and AVS sequences at D1(720×480) 30 f/s at 35 MHz with only 0.53 mW power consumption at 1.8 V power supply.