CES 2005 Part 4

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But the most impressive thing that Broadcom had on show, was a new all-in-one multimedia chip for mobile phones. This new chip from Alphamosaic (a company that Broadcom recently bought out) looks set to change the way we look at our mobile phones.

Not only can this new chip handle basic duties like MIDI and MP3 music playback, but it can also record MPEG4 video at 30fps, in VGA resolution. It will quite happily playback MPEG4 video, and can rotate the display from portrait to landscape seamlessly.

But it’s the 3D performance that was most impressive. Broadcom had the chip running PlayStation 1 games in emulation mode, with frame rates of over 100fps. With this in mind, gaming on your mobile phone could be set to change for ever. Amazingly, even when the chip was running 3D applications, it was still cool to the touch, so implementation in even the smallest of phones shouldn’t be a problem.

Broadcom is currently in talks with several mobile phone manufacturers, and we should hopefully see products using this new chip around mid 2005. There’s definitely a lot of money to be made with mobile device chips, as can be seen from the amount of effort that nVidia and ATI are putting into this area. Ultimately, a bit of extra competition can only be a good thing for the consumer.

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