X-bit labs

NVIDIA's GoForce Graphics Finds Home in Mitac, Mitsubishi Mobile Phones.

Category: Mobile

by Anton Shilov

[ 01/13/2004 | 07:56 PM ]

The long-lasting battle between NVIDIA and ATI Technologies on desktop graphics market is not over and will never be, but there is another one underway. Weeks after ATI announced its huge design-win with Motorola and days after the company released its new IMAGEON 2300 multimedia co-processor for handhelds, NVIDIA said its GoForce 2100 and 2150 chips are incorporated into Mitsubishi and MiTAC mobile phones.

NVIDIA’ GoForce 2150 media processor saw the light of the day in late September 2003. Incorporating technologies from MediaQ, a well-known developer of chips for handheld applications acquired by NVIDIA in 2004, the GoForce 2150 chip is among the industry’s most-powerful co-processors for mobile phones. The first multimedia co-processor from Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA has 1.3MP camera support, 64-bit 2D graphics accelerator, embedded memory for LCD frame buffer and flexible CPU interface.  The versatile LCD controller also allows for fast-switching dual screen interfaces, typically implemented as a large active-matrix colour screen inside the handset and a smaller LCD located outside. NVIDIA GoForce 2150 supports over 70 different display interfaces (including CSTN, TFT, OLED and LTPS technology) at up to HVGA (320x480) resolution.

The GoForce 2150 chip may be found in MiTAC’s Mio 8390 smartphone based on Microsoft Windows Smartphone Edition.

A bit simplified version of the GoForce 2150 is the GoForce 2100 that has a little bit less horse power in compared to the 2150, but still give customers impressive experience. The chip is better known under MediaQ MA2100 brand and is pin-to-pin compatible to the newer 2150 solution. The GoForce 2100 offers VGA camera compatibility, supporting QVGA resolutions suited to mobile phone displays, and it provides an onboard JPEG encoder, which handles captured images and compresses still pictures in resolutions up to 640x480.

NVIDIA GoForce 2100 was chosen by Mitsubishi Electric for its M341i mobile phone. The M341i incorporates a digital camera, a 310 000 pixel, 1.9” 262K colour main screen and a 0.9” outer screen.

The market of powerful mobile phones and smartphones with integrated digital cameras is growing at extreme pace these days. According to estimations 170 million of camera-enabled cell phones will be sold worldwide by 2006, therefore, both NVIDIA and ATI will probably be very aggressive in the field.