AMD launches handheld D160/M210/A250 & 3D/VG GPU IP

Wednesday 13th February 2008, 01:00:00 AM, written by Arun

AMD just announced several new handheld chips aimed at a variety of different markets, from music-oriented Portable Media Players to Mobile TV and passing by mainstream mobile phones. The company also made their 3D & OpenVG IP official, although little information on these were available at press time.

AMD's Imageon D160 is a refresh of their previous Mobile TV solution; it's a 'fully qualified Antenna-to-Display solution' that includes full video decoding support. That makes it usable both as a multimedia+TV coprocessor in mobile phones and portable media players, and as a standalone solution for USB keys, laptops, etc. - given the wording of the press releases, we'd tend to believe it's a System-in-Package but we aren't sure.

Next up is the Imageon M210, which is an audio-only coprocessor that integrates all the analogue and power management in a single package (we aren't sure if it's single-chip or not). AMD markets it as a "~32mW/99dB audio subsystem" that delivers a very impressive 100 hours of play time when using a 900mAh/3.7V battery.

The M210 should be very attractive in audio-only portable media players (although that's a new market for AMD as far as we can tell) and as a coprocessor for mainstream mobile phones; for example, it could be combined with a single-chip GSM/EDGE solution to create an interesting but still very cost-effective end-product. It could also be combined with the D160 for higher-end music/video player with Mobile TV support in, it seems, only two packages.

And then finally there's the Imageon A250, which is AMD's first application processor. You heard that right: so much for NVIDIA being the only one company that stops focusing on multimedia coprocessors. There's a twist though: AMD isn't even disclosing what ARM core they're using, and at what frequency!

This makes it relatively clear that they think it's fundamentally still a multimedia coprocessor, but now it can also be designed into portable media players and help the baseband if it's not strong enough for web browsing and so forth. It's also one of the lowest-end and most cost-conscious application processors announced today:

• Unknown ARM core.
• OpenVG 1.1 acceleration; no 3D acceleration.
• Dedicated hardware blocks for Audio & JPEG.
• D1/VGA video decoding/encoding (H.264 we presume).
• 8MPixels Camera Sensor & Imaging with 15FPS preview.
• External display interface via TV Output.

That's a very different market from what NVIDIA and STMicroelectronics are pursuing with their latest chips, and many basebands are already starting to integrate that level of functionality. AMD must obviously be confident in the number of design wins they can grab with it despite that though, otherwise they wouldn't have developed it! It will be interesting to see how successful it is in the market in the next year or two.

Finally, AMD also made their OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenVG 1.1 IP official. As a reminder, these cores were licensed to STMicroelectronics, Freescale, Qualcomm and Nokia in 2007. We wish they gave out more data though, because it's harder to get excited about cool technology when you basically don't know anything about it. Oh well, at least we know what extensions it supports based on AMD's OpenGL ES 2.0 emulator.

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ati ± imageon, minixenos, z460, z180

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