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Cell phone makers aren't the only ones hoping to one-up the iPhone these days. Increasingly, it's the silicon wizards themselves that are scrambling to conjure up powerful (yet low-powered) processors and diminutive architectures that will serve as brains for this future generation of iPhone killers/imitators.
Following in the footsteps of Intel and others, graphics chip maker Nvidia unveiled a new applications processor at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona on Monday. According to the company, this new chip will let smartphone users shoot, watch and stream video in full 720p video, snap up to 12-megapixel pictures, and pave the way for a whole array of sophisticated 3-D mobile games thanks to a graphics core that delivers performance similar to Nvidia's own GeForce 6 desktop counterpart. Oh, and this chip's for Windows Mobile users only, in case you were wondering.
"If you give truth serum to the executive of any phone company -- and believe me, I've talked to them all -- they'll all tell you they want to make a better iPhone" says Michael Rayfield, the general manager of Nvidia's mobile business unit.
That's precisely what Nvidia is hoping its new APX 2500 processor will do for phones running Windows Mobile, which incidentally is already getting spanked by the iPhone in U.S. marketshare.
What the iPhone did for the mobile industry, Rayfield notes, was to "fundamentally changed what a phone architecture could be…it basically forced a PC architecture into a smartphone."
That very fact has translated into shift in how people view their phones, according to Nvidia. While Nokia started using the term "multimedia computer" to describe its own phones long before anyone else, it was the iPhone that actually got people thinking of their phones along those lines. People and chipmakers.
Now, with the introduction of its new mobile processor, Nvidia joins a bevy of other heavyweights -- including Intel, Samsung, Texas Instruments and others -- who are all trying to construct more powerful, hyper-efficient chips that will bring about better performance, and, in Nvidia's case, a little bit of graphical zing to the mobile world.
But the move into the lucrative mobile market and its project 6 billion users by 2011 isn't going to happen overnight. Nvidia admits that while the processor will start shipping in June, it won't likely appear in devices before the end of the year. By mid-2009, the company hopes to have design wins in various cellphones made by ODMs in Asia, and tier-one handset makers following in the end of 2009.
The company also has some stiff competition heading into the year. Last week, Toshiba described a new chip that also decodes 720p video. Likewise, Texas Instruments recently detailed an applications processor that uses an ARM 11 core and can supposedly handle H.264 video streaming.
More importantly, as today's multiple failed attempts a touchscreen UIs demonstrate, it's going to take more than parroting one aspect of a successful smartphone to produce its superior. New processors that allow for HD video and better power savings are a good start. But if anything, the iPhone has captured people's attention because it marries a series of unique features into one device.
