Windows Phone Thoughts: AMD Announces Suite of Tools for Developing Handheld Games

"At GDC today, AMD announced a suite of tools for developing handheld gaming content for the company's next-generation mobile graphics parts. The suite includes Rendermonkey 1.7, a shader tool that will let game developers write graphics code for a range of devices that support the OpenVG 1.0, OpenGL 2.0, and Unified Shader Architecture technologies. ATI's Unified Shader Architecture in particular is one of the main selling points of the Xbox 360, and AMD will offer support for unified shaders on its next generation of mobile parts...The Imageon processor line, announced by AMD last month, is essentially a "GPU" for mobile devices. Imageon is more flexible than a desktop GPU, of course, since with a mobile device you want to save on cost and battery life by cramming as much of the phone onto one piece of silicon as you possibly can. So Imageon has support for 3D and 2D graphics, audio processing, digital still and video cameras, TV out, video recording with image stabilization, video transcoding, and various other multimedia features. All of this stuff is on a single chip that's separate from the phone's radio chip, so that the handset maker can upgrade to a new version of Imageon without having to go through the process of FCC qualification each time they add features."



We haven't seen a Windows Mobile device with an Imageon processor yet, but we can always hope. If the power requirements could be kept under control, a GPU could really help boost media processing on the device that's now currently done by the CPU - and we all know that once we start playing a game that uses up 100% of our CPU, battery life goes into the toilet along with overall device performance (your device will check email and the game will sputter). Before we see the software though, we need the hardware - developers need a platform with which to sell their wares. I wonder if we'll see any Windows Mobile devices with an Imageon processor out this year? i-Mate's Ultimate line would have seemed to be a good fit for something like this.