Windows Phone Thoughts: ARM NEON Multimedia Instruction Set, To Compete With WMMX?

ARM, the company who has been hugely successful in designing and licensing an instruction set to companies like Intel and Samsung, is now setting its sights on handheld multimedia solutions.

"ARM today launched its new NEON™ technology, a media and signal processing solution designed to accelerate a broad range of applications. The ARM® NEON technology is targeted for mobile and consumer products that need the flexibility to implement multiple combinations of video encode/decode, 3-D graphics, speech processing, audio decoding, image processing, and baseband functionality. NEON technology will be implemented in future ARM processors, and will be supported by ARM and third-party tool chains enabling broad industry adoption."

For the architecture folks amongst you, this is another SIMD instruction set -- geared towards mobile devices. It presumably will compete head-on with Intel's WMMX (Wireless MMX). It'll be interesting to see how long these take to hit the market and what effect they'll have -- as it is, battery life is a huge constraint -- but it's cool to see an increased focus on mobile media solutions.