Graphics chip market leader Nvidia, used the MWC in Barcelona to move into the mobile market, with an applications processor and an eco-system of partners and a touch screen reference platform built around its APX 2500, which it says is a breakthrough applications processor enabling 3D user interfaces and HD video. Currently it is being geared up entirely for handsets that run Windows Mobile.
The key to the APX 2500 chip is 10 hours of 720p HD playback on a handset battery or up to 100 hours of audio, around four times the playback of the latest touch screen handsets, so the company claims. It also has the power to run an HD camcorder. It sounds like Nvidia is planning to go head to head with Texas Instruments OMAP 3 architecture, from a standing start.
It has put 800 man years of engineering effort into the chip and apart from the HD playback and capture it feature a new, ultra-low-power GeForce core which can handle both OpenGL ES 2.0 and Microsoft Direct3D and which has the lowest power of any 3D hardware available.
But perhaps it’s the partnerships that it has signed up that are the most impressive, and while you’d expect it to be an ARM licensee, its other partners include Atheros for Wi-Fi, Infineon for its HSDPA modem, NXP for power management, Planet9 for maps and navigation software, Siano Mobile Silicon for its Mobile TV chip, Synaptics for its touch screen interface, and Wolfson Microelectronics for audio codecs.
The Nvidia APX 2500 is sampling today and will go into full production by the end of Q2 2008. Nvidia did not mention how much work it has done to integrate or test its partners within the eco-system, but it looks to us that it is early days.