nVidia's latest baby, the GoForce 5500 (that's right, GoForce), has turned a lot of heads. Designed for use in, of course, mobile devices and embedded environments like handhelds, the new GPU really does sound cool. It supports things like native HDTV and digital television decoding, resolutions of 1024x768 for mobile devices, and up to 10mpx picture resolutions (up to the discretion of the manufacturers). As for performance, even in this tiny environment it was able to churn out 3D games... on a phone. Hoping to reclaim what was lost on the N-Gage, nVidia is also touting the power requirements of this new GPU, which will be even less than previous generation chips despite it offering much more in terms of features and performance.
Battery life is always a key concern for users of powerful mobile applications, but Nvidia said the new chip outperforms its predecessors in reducing the power consumed by entertainment applications as well as voice calls.
nVidia will soon offer the GPU to manufacturers and expects the first retail products to be rolled out before December of this year. Deathmatches on your cell phone is in our future.