While Intel has sold the rights to the XScale and is trying to impose x86 in MIDs (Mobile Internet Device), Nvidia slowly advances its pawns at the Mobile World Congress which is currently taking place in Barcelona by unveiling the APX 2500 destined to the Smartphone 2.0 .
You may recall that the GeForce’s creator acquired the company which conceived the iPod, PortalPlayer, at the end of 2006 and thus gained some rather experienced engineers. The company will therefore offer a single chip engraved in 65nm containing an ARM 11 processor set at 750 MHz and equipped with 256 KB of L2 cache. The graphic circuit whose architecture is derived from that of the previous GeForce generation will support Direct3D Mobile and OpenGL ES 2.0.
In terms of video, this chipset which was conceived for 720p decodes VC-1/WMV9, H.264 and MPEG4 formats (also encoding the last two). Furthermore, it can support HDMI 1.2 720p (in 1280 x 720), composite, S-Video output as well as LCDs and CRTs in SXGA (1280 x 1024).
Finally, Nvidia announced that it
can read 10 hours of HD video in 720p (...) and also has HD camcorder capabilities, something which is a bit vague. In reading the
Partner quotes document related to the development of the APX 2500 platform, we can reasonably hope that it will be integrated into telephones supporting Wi-Fi and 3G.