Posted on Monday, February 11 2008 @ 3:09 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
The NVIDIA APX 2500 is the first mobile CPU to support both encoding and decoding of 720p HD video and it also supports 12 megapixel pictures along with image and video stabilization. The CPU only supports Windows Mobile as NVIDIA believes this operating system will grow a lot faster than Linux and it's bundled with a Ultra Low Power GeForce GPU that supports both OpenGL ES 2.0 and Direct3D Mobile for advanced 3D interfaces.
"We move fast," Rayfield said. "By separating the modem, you get off of a telecommunications product cycle and on to a consumer cycle. We should be able to speed up the rate of innovation in handsets, which people think is quick but which is actually miserably slow."NVIDIA says the APX 2500 will be launched at a price competitive with Texas Instruments' next-generation OMAP 3 line processors. By the end of this year the APX 2500 should be available in some GPS units, portable media players will follow in early 2009 and by late 2009 there should be some mobile phones on the market with this mobile processor.
From the other side of the coin, Intel recently said they're moving into the mobile space with their Moorestown line of processors. There, Nvidia can leverage ARM's low power architecture to create a more compelling solution for smaller devices, Rayfield said. On a single battery charge of a battery the same size as the iPhone's, an APX 2500 device can play 10 hours of video or 100 hours of audio, according to Nvidia.
To show off the ULP GeForce, Nvidia's engineers wrote a 3D user interface for Windows Mobile that they're demoing at the Mobile World Congress trade show. Nvidia will be showing a development unit with an 800 x 480, 4-inch screen, HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networking, GPS, Mobile TV, 256 MB of RAM and a 5-megapixel camera at the show. But don't expect to see that handheld on shelves; it's just to show what the APX 2500 can do.
