Feature Articles

AMD - Loaded and Back in Action

By Vijay Anand - 1 Jun 2008

... And AMD on the Small Screens

AMD's Penetration into Handhelds

Like the digital TVs, ATI was also deeply rooted into handhelds and powering the display and graphics capabilities of the small screens we use so frequently and take for granted. They've already delivered hundreds of millions of graphics chips for the cell phones. This too AMD has handily acquired. Currently AMD's Imageon processors can be found in a number of Motorola, Samsung, LG and other handsets (head over here for the full list of phone models ). These same players however also use NVIDIA's solution as well (and you can see the list of phones using NVIDIA's GoForce over here ). AMD/ATI however does have the market lead time as they've been doing this a lot earlier than NVIDIA has.

AMD Imageon processors power several mobile handsets - you might never know if yours has an AMD Imageon inside.

At the moment, AMD's Imageon team is working on more complete solutions to improve their processors for next generation smartphones which may use 3D user interfaces and have the ability to play 3D games satisfyingly (smoothly). Currently the best graphics you can get out of a mobile phone is somewhere equivalent (or slightly worse than) to that of the Nintendo 64 consoles of yore. What they are trying to do is to get the Xbox 360 graphics engine into smartphones/handhelds. By doing this, they can achieve two aims - get Xbox 360 standard of graphics onto these handheld devices and make it easy to port over games designed for the Xbox 360 platform over to the handheld devices. When we asked if AMD is looking to power mobile gaming devices like the PSP or Nintendo DS Lite, they are quite open to the idea, when the opportunity strikes. Already, AMD is powering 2 of the 3 current generation gaming consoles. And since they've plans to bring Xbox 360 type of graphics power to handehelds like smartphones, and with current technology to bring that into much lower powered environments, they're confident that they are every bit as competitive to provide for mobile gaming console type devices.

In addition to this, AMD's overall focus in this segment is to boost graphics capabilities or the full application's processing capabilities to really deliver tactile useable interfaces (because devices are going to be sporting larger and larger displays which eventually will encompass both the interactive UI as well as the useable screen space) with power to perform stuff like real-time video transcoding and the likes.

As announced in Mobile World Congress 2008, they do have several upcoming solutions for these, but to get them into qualification with vendors and then to hit retail, this will take time (generally a year later), as it is the general length of time for design cycles of C.E. products. Some of the announced new Imageon family of products are as follows:-

  • AMD Imageon D160 Receiver (mobile TV solution)
  • AMD Imageon M210 audio processor
  • AMD Imageon A250 applications processor

It looks like AMD has its upcoming series all figured out, but there seems to be new competition coming up from NVIDIA with the AXP 2500 applications processor that's also billed as the next generation platform for building smartphones for Windows Mobile devices . Not only this, NVIDIA seems to be getting into some new x86 compatible solutions with their upcoming Tegra series that's a computer-on-a-chip kind of solution that's also targeted in the same space. Of course, it will be a long time before we can actually find out if NVIDIA's new entries now have any impact due to the long C.E. design and validation cycle. Still, AMD does have the advantage of ATI's longstanding relationships with key mobile makers with a far higher penetration of their Imageon devices than NVIDIA has made progress with their existing GoForce series.

On a related note, AMD has also licensed vector graphics (via OpenVG) and 3D (via OpenGL ES) technologies to mobile chipset and silicon suppliers to deliver good image quality and performance with low power consumption. Some of the companies that AMD has sealed a deal as of late 2007 are Nokia, QUALCOMM Inc., STMicroelectronics and Freescale Semiconductor. And to fulfill their needs, AMD offers the following processors:-

  • AMD Z180 OpenVG 1.x graphics core
  • AMD Z460 OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics core

A concept photo from AMD showing what their handheld 3D graphics chips are capable.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.