NVIDIA APX 2500 to sample in Q3 2008

Another thing NVIDIA proudly talked about at their Analyst Day is the upcoming APX 2500 chip.

The firm says this was a very large investment for them and that it's the most advanced ultra-low power computer ever built. This chip has been under development for three years and more than 500 people have worked on it.

NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says the APX 2500 is basically a full-fledged computer in a chip the size of a dime. The APX 2500 will use little power and will enable manufacturers to create small devices that run hundreds hours of music or ten hours of HD video.

H.264 video encoding isn't a problem for the APX 2500 and Huang also said the chip supports HDMI so devices with the APX 2500 can easily be connected to large-size LCD displays.

The first APX 2500 samples will become available for production at the start of the third quarter and the first devices will arrive by the end of this year. NVIDIA says their APX 2500 has received several design wins but they didn't share names of manufacturers that will adopt the chip. The first devices with the APX 2500 will be GPS navigation units and next year we can expect portable media players and handsets with the APX 2500.



The APX 2500 is smaller than a dime:



Market research indicates there's a very large target market for chips like the APX 2500: