The Register®

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/09/philips_nexperia_powervr/

Sony Ericsson adopts PowerVR MBX for smart phones

Graphics chip tech courtesy of Philips

By Tony Smith

Posted in Mobile, 9th February 2005 10:45 GMT

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Philips this week announced the release of its latest PowerVR MBX-based media processor, confirming that the chip will be used by Sony Ericsson in a future incarnation of the P910 smart phone.

Philips' chip, the Nexperia PNX4008, is pitched directly at the smart phone market. The company licensed Imagination Technologies' graphics core design through the latter's key licensing partner, ARM, in March 2004 [1]. Indeed, the PNX4008 also incorporates an ARM9 processing core.

Sony Ericsson did not say which handsets will use the PNX4008, but since the P800, P900 and P910 have all used older members of the Nexperia family, it's a good bet that one of the P910's successor will incorporate the new chip.

Separately, Imagination said that it will release its first two public PowerVR MBX OpenGL ES software development kits next week.

The PC-hosted SDKs will be made available on Monday, and are geared to code development for software designed to run on Windows Mobile 2003-based devices equipped with a PowerVR MBX-derived graphics chip, such as Intel's PXA2700, which can be found in Dell's Axim x50v, for example. A separate SDK targets PCs running emulation software.

Imagination said the SDKs allow content creators to use standard PowerVR MBX features and extensions, such as extra multi-texturing capabilities, DOT3 per-pixel lighting and PVRTC texture compression.

Both SDKs will be posted on the PowerVR developer site [2] on 14 February 2005. ®

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