Intel mulls Hi-Def mobile video

INTEL BOFFINS have set themselves a tight and ambitious five to eight year timeframe in which to develop small, integrated chips capable of running high-definition 1080p video on portable devices.

Chipzilla believes five to eight years may just be long enough to fix leaky power in processors and scale the graphics performance on its chips to achieve the same rich multimedia smartphone content Nvidia is already boasting on its Tegra 600.

Intel, obviously oblivious to the word 'irony', plans to use an an on-chip accelerator to bump up graphics performance by allowing for multiple streams of graphics data to be processed concurrently using Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) tech.

It isn't the first time the chip giant has toyed with SIMD, using the technology back in the 90s with the MMX extensions introduced for its Pentium processor. It's just taking the firm's engineers a bit longer than they thought to make it at all useful. This has been blamed on high power leakage and a supreme difficulty for the boffins to figure out how to scale it down to low voltages.

So, finally realising that video on mobile devices is a hot topic, Intel is taking the opportunity at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco to show off its plans for a SIMD accelerator to purportedly scale smoothly to really, really low voltages.

The firm also reckons its circuits will be up to eight times more energy efficient than those which currently exist, drawing only about 300 millivolts compared to the current 1.1 to 1.2 volts but, honestly, that's not really a very impressive promise looking so far ahead. µ