PowerVR MBX-driven portable planned
ST Microelectronics team up with their old chums Imagination
ST Microelectronics is once again to team up with Imagination Technologies, in order to produce designs for a pocket entertainment device. The device will consist of a Super H low-power RISC core and Imagination's PowerVR MBX chipset for 2D / 3D graphics acceleration, as announced this morning, almost a year to the day after the unveiling of PowerVR MBX itself. ST will take responsibility for the other aspects of the device, including its storage system, network and security features and the display / software side of it. The 0.13 micron PowerVR MBX chipset is capable of processing four million triangles per second at 120MHz if Imagination's PR is to be believed. MBX has already been demonstrated running Quake 3-level graphics on a mobile device, and with ST's Kyro business all but abandoned, MBX could be a very lucrative alternative. One of the stumbling blocks for modern PDAs is their inability to store large quantities of audio / video data at any reasonable quality. MP3s aren't too much of a problem now, but the wide variety of video standards and codecs makes playback of movie trailers and other videos somewhat troublesome. And of course most PDAs are ill equipped to deal with the processing requirements of the average recording. Related Feature - PowerVR MBX announced for mobiles