Cambridge-based ARM has fired its latest salvo at Intel in the mobile processor market, announcing a new 'Osprey' 2GHz multicore chip.
ARM is developing dual-core, quad-core and eight-core Cortex-A9 processor designs and making aggressive moves into the mobile, netbook and smartbook markets, with the company promising that gamers will see netbooks capable of running games featuring the latest 3D graphics early next year.
Specifically, ARM is announcing this week that it is currently working on the development of two Cortex-A9 processor designs "enabling silicon manufacturers to have a rapid and low-risk route to silicon for high-performance, low-power Cortex-A9 processor-based devices."
"This hard macro implementation operates in excess of 2GHz when selected from typical silicon and represents an ideal solution for high-margin performance-oriented applications," ARM said.
3D netbook gaming in 2010
TechRadar spoke with ARM''s Eric Schorn, VP of Marketing for ARM's processor division, who informed us that "the Cortex-A9 MPCore processor has already been widely accepted as the processor of choice for high-performance embedded applications across a broad spectrum of demanding consumer and enterprise devices."
ARM wants to move into those markets "traditionally occupied by proprietary architectures" and Schorn promises TechRadar that we should see consumer devices based around ARM's new potentially available as early as "the first half of 2010".
"We should see some interesting implementations of Osprey," Schorn told TechRadar, noting that he expects to see devices such as netbooks that are capable of running the latest 3D PC games at some point in the first half of next year.
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cubeboy101
October 25th 2009
4. menelaus YOU MIGHT BE ON TO SOMETHING WITH OUT KNOWING IT.....
tegra rumor for new nintendo DS,evidence of true hd gaming specs using the same tech as NEW DS in 2010...nintendo just confirmed wii 2 to be smaller more compact and power efficient....systems like ion can run cod 4
i think a soc arm nvidea custom tegra system will power the new nintendo hybred console
with a docking station unit that polays wii discs
say 800mhz handheld mode and 1.5 to 2 ghz in wii hd tv mode wilst sat in a mini mii wii like docking unit
a do it all gaming handheld hybred with aditional wii controls 2010/2011
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mbb
September 17th 2009
3. I was under the impression the article meant 3D as in stereoscopic - as polygon 3D games are playable on Nvidia's Ion platform (just about) on netbooks already.
It's true that cost-effectiveness dictates gaming possibilities, but this is a netbook processor we're talking about. The sort of games we're talking about will never be cost effective on a custom, niche OS. Philosophically, it's possible to port the games. Pragmatically, it simply isn't going to happen.
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menelaus
September 16th 2009
2. The Playstaion, Xbox or Wii do not run Windows 7 and they have plenty of 3D games.
The main issue is how easy it is to convert from an existing platform and if it's cost effective.
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mbb
September 16th 2009
1. Unfortunately, Windows 7 won't run on ARM chips, so unless there's a big take up of Google's Chrome OS by game developers it seems a little moot whether it's capable of running 3D games or not
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