You know what would be cool...

[Longbaugh]

You know what would be cool? If they made an Mini accelerator chip for pocket pc's.  I don't know how quake2 or quake3 would run if it were ported to pocketpc...it would more then likely be slow as hell, but if they made like a geforce2 ultra with like 32 megs DDR memory to fit into a ipaq expansion pak that would be cool - you could like do Adobe Photoshop graphics on your pocketpc and stuff, i don't know much about pocketpcs, i just bought mine last week and I am an avid quake3 Urban Terror player. Just thought it would be a neat idea tho.

[Paul]

we already talked about this not long ago<br><br>i think theres new 3d chips coming on the ARM processors

[Diego Cueva]

Check this link, Nvidia may be working a graphics accelerator card....<br><br>http://www.web-services.net/cebit/pub/Art-2120682239.html<br><br>"After MV20, the product line is also going to be extended to the handheld market. Already, MPEG-4 video is coming to WindowsCE devices, such as the Compaq iPaq and the Mitsubishi Trium Mondo GSM PDA phone. This is going to cause a discontinuity as big as the MV20, says Huang." <br>              - quote from the CeBIT site <br><br>

[Digby]

It would be cool, however 3D chips are a huge drain on batteries, and battery life is already a stickler with the current crop of PocketPC devices.<br><br>I'm sure Dan East would be happy if all the PocketPC devices simply had a floating point unit.  That would be a move in the right direction and lots of applications benefit from floating point hardware - not just games.<br><br>I get the idea that the current PocketPC manufacturers don't really care much for gaming on the devices.  The Compaq iPaq is the most popular of the PocketPC devices.  It continues to be updated and has the same stinking button state serialization problem.  Compaq can't make these devices fast enough to keep up with demand, so why should they change anything?<br><br>I think NVidia, ST Micro, and others are building these chipsets for dedicated gaming devices and not a generalized PocketPC.  Even if the chip were available, the manufacturers of the various PocketPCs would have to add them, and the MS would have to provide an API and driver model so that applications could take advantage of the new hardware.<br><br>It would be cool, but there's a lot of work to do before it happens.

[Moose or Chuck]

The Geforce2 Go GPU doesn't drain much battery on laptops, I don't see why it would if it were on a PC Card expansion. Also, Intel is making their next generation of ARM processors with built in graphics accelerators featuring Lossless FSAA (meaning the FPS is the same as if FSAA were off). I'm pretty sure that these new 416MHz Arm processors will also have floating point routines built in. <br><br>Compaq can kiss my ass. They won't even support their biggest portable product and make it better, even with the new release of it. I seriously doubt that NVidia would make a card that would be dedicated to PocketPC products. They will probably just release CE drivers for their GF2 Go chipset so that integrating it is just a matter of the mainboard design. I'm just waiting until my Wireless T3 line is installed so I can watch my full quality DVDs being shared on my computer on the side of the street. Or maybe using it to run EVERYTHING off of my desktop PC so all of my 32MB of RAM can be free along with my 1GB Microdrive just incase I need to download 1GB of stuff in.... 10 minutes.<br><br>But since that company went out of business it will be a while before my wireless T3 line is installed. ):(

[Digby]

Since you brought up the issue of power consumption of NVidia's GeForce2 Go chip, here are some numbers:<br><br>From Tom's Hardware website: (http://www6.tomshardware.com/business/0 ... ex-03.html)<br><br><br>Idle: 0.9 watts (900 mW)<br>Max:  2.8 watts<br>Graphics app: 1.09 watts<br><br>Let's compare this with the iPaq's StrongArm CPU (from Intel's site: http://developer.intel.com/design/stron ... d/sa-1110/)<br><br>Normal Mode: <400 mWatts<br>Idle Mode: <100 mWatts<br>Sleep Mode: <50 uA<br><br>So from the numbers above, that so-called "low-power" GPU is going to consume TWICE as much power doing nothing as the CPU is when running full out.  That's certainly not the chip I'd want in my PDA.<br><br>If you have it, front me the URL of Intel mentioning adding graphics capability to the ARM core.  I'd like to read more about it.<br>

[999]

Well, he did mention in laptops, which I believe would be about *decent*, but in a PDA, even if worked onto the mainboard, would seriously need one huge honking battery run it for period of time.<br><br>Xscale is what I'm after, plus it's supposed to consume even less power than what the current ARM chipset is pulling. Or so I have read.<br><br>

[Robotbeat]

Actually, I read on the Xscale website that it won't have a floating-point unitor floating-point specific code. That sucks. Does Intel hate floating point, or something? I mean, the Pentium 4 sucks at floating point, especially when compared to an Athlon (of course, the Pentium 4 totally blows away StrongARM at anything). This is one reason why I have been very unhappy with Intel lately<br><br>Intel, if you are listening, PLEASE ADD FLOATING POINT TO XSCALE!!!

[Moose or Chuck]

[Digby]

[SonicSilicon]

[randall]

[SonicSilicon]