SiRF Prima
SiRF (NASDAQ: SIRF) today announced a new chipset called the SiRFprima. The new chipset will work with GPS/Galileo systems to provide location information. In addition it will be an application processor and support media capabilities such as audio and video recording/playback. The Prima is also designed to handle high resolution 3D graphics and can be run on Windows CE and Linux platforms.
“With its high-performance multifunction engines all tuned to run in harmony, the SiRFprima platform sets a new standard for performance and integration in the emerging market for exciting new location-aware convergence products,” said Kanwar Chadha, founder and vice president of marketing for SiRF. “We believe the SiRFprima platform delivers on our vision of the convergence of location with rich media content, and extends SiRF’s leadership in providing innovative solutions that bring the power of location to the mainstream.”
For all of you circuit geeks that know a whole lot more about some of these specs than I do… here are some additional buzz words for you…. ARM11 core, PowerVR MBX 3D graphics accelerator core, vertex geometry processor and PowerVR MVED1 video encode/decode accelerator. It supports OpenGL ES, Direct3DM and OpenVG.
This is a 64 channel chip with more than 1,000,000 correlators. Correlators are what helped make the SiRFstarIII chipset such a superstar and it only had 200,000 correlators. We recently talked about SiRFInstantFixII which this chipset will obviously support.
SiRF will begin showing off the chipset at GSMA next week and will begin sampling to customers in the April-June timeframe so don’t expect to find this in GPS devices on store shelves next week.
