STE gains first breakthrough for NovaThor
Has major design win at last, with HTC and China Mobile, while AMD hovers in the mobile wings
Published: 27 September, 2011
READ MORE: China | Semiconductor | TD-SCDMA
The mobile processor wars continue to rage, and this week sees two firms which had been left out of the vanguard putting in a new bid for relevance. ST-Ericsson's NovaThor chipset has failed to make much impact, despite impressive specs, but now has its first major deal with HTC, while AMD is fleshing out its mobile roadmap.
STE has suffered in recent quarters from the transition from legacy products and the shrinking of business from its traditional friend Nokia. Its main growth area has been in China, where it has invested heavily in TD-SCDMA, and now its efforts there are bearing fruit, with NovaThor being included in a smartphone for China Mobile, to be made by HTC.
The Sensation Z710t supports China Mobile's own 3G standard, TD-SCDMA, and comes with high end HTC Android smartphone features - 3D graphics, high definition multimedia and multitasking. The handset runs on the NovaThor integrated platform, designed to challenge Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor/modem combinations in smartphones and tablets. The STE platform consists of the A9500 dual-core application processor, running at 1GHz, and the Thor M6718 modem.
The Sensation Z710t also boasts an 8-megapixel camera and a 4.3-inch display and will be the heavyweight among China Mobile's offering, which has lagged behind those of its 3G rivals because of the limited TD-SCDMA ecosystem in the first phase. "ST-Ericsson's new NovaThor platform has enabled us to develop a world class Android smartphone for China Mobile's TD network," said HTC's COO Matthew Costello, in a statement.
Meanwhile, AMD has scarcely figured in the mobile processor race, a factor in the ousting of its previous CEO earlier this year. Its leaked roadmap indicates a growing focus on portable devices, especially tablets, though the firm is stopping short of handsets. Trinity, the follow-up to AMD's current Llano applications processor for notebooks, will come into full production in January, reports ZDnet, while the firm will also release an upgrade for the Desna processor, to be called Hondo, which will reduce power consumption from 5.9W to 4.5W. This will make it suited to smaller mobile devices than AMD currently targets and start to fulfil the firm's promised move into tablets. Hondo runs on two Bobcat cores and the Loveland graphics chip and will be followed, in 2013, by fully tablet friendly platforms, called Kaveri and Kabini.
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