Nvidia segues into telephone show

Intel only has one of these, which Pat Gelsinger rode about on an IDF or two back, but he can't compete with the flirtatious French mademoiselles riding round and chatting to the boys here.

The firm used its conference time to announce the AR10 3D core, which includes a programmable shader based 3D core for handhelds, phot realistic real time 3D graphics, and OpenGL ES and D3DM compliant.

It's not a chip yet, it is intellectual property, but is likely to end up in chips.

It's the first time Nvidia has been to this conference, with Dan Vivoli, the firm's marketing manager, using the blackjack analogy he used at the system integrators' forum in Monaco last year. It was a re-spin of that talk, tailored for the mobile boys and girls of the press that flock round this conference.

There are quite a few games companies down here in Cannes. Nokia has blagged the boules space opposite the esplanade to entice people into using its Ngage hand held gaming machines.

Vivoli said: There are more people today that grew up with games consoles that didn't. And they expect the battery to last a week. Actually they want a battery to last a month but we've conditioned them to expect a week. Nvidia used the time at its disposal to chat about the technology it has for mobile phones, which it first announced back at Computex in Taiwan.

The firm rolled out a Mitsubishi executive - unfortunately not on a Segway - to say how his firm was using GoForce 2100 media processors to decrease LCD power consumption and improve battery life on its mobile phones.

2004 may be the year of MPEG4 video content, but 3D gaming is the challenge for 2005, the Mitsubishi man said. Yes.

Vivoli said that the handset is becoming the pervasive entertainment platform, with estimated revenues for video games of many billions. More people have cellphones, he said, and they expect games on phones.

Neil Trevett from the Khronos Group, said his firm was developing OpenGL ES, which will work with Windows mobile, Palm, Linux, and will allow Java and C/C++ applications to call the application programming interface (API).

Forty five companies are members of the group, he said. Everything is happening in accelerated cellphone time.

Bill Pinnell from Symbian, who looks after games at the group, said there were 10 million Symbian enabled devices.

Fathammer said that hardware acceleration for mobiles helped its X-Forge product, which it claims allows 3D quality products to be run on mobile platforms. It said it will release X Forge 2.0 in just a few weeks.

The baby boomers started to find out about games using technology in the 1970s. It seems to us that the same people who bought games then, buy games now, proving that the old adage about men stilling being boys at heart is still true.