Small Is Beautiful - IEEE Xplore

2 downloads 38815 Views 112KB Size Report
sors (GP2): The cell phone market now constitutes the ... Mobile phone manufacturers also want highly ... Windows CE, and developers quickly encounter ...
ENTERTAINMENT COMPUTING

Small Is Beautiful

Despite these impressive features, Nvidia is playing catch up in the mobile arena. ATI holds the market leader position with 72 percent of the mobile GPU market to Nvidia’s 22 percent. Meanwhile, Intel’s 62 percent share dominates the integrated mobile CPU market, in which ATI holds only a 26 percent share (www.theregister. co.uk/2004/10/27/graphics_chip_ market_q3_04/). This market remains a moving tar-

Michael Macedonia, Georgia Tech Research Institute

T

his past summer, 3Dlabs’ Neal Trevett revealed a dramatic sea change in the computer graphics world at the ACM Workshop on General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processors (GP2): The cell phone market now constitutes the predominant force in graphics chip design. The more than 500 million mobile phones that sold worldwide this year have driven competition in this market to new levels. Cell phone sales figures dwarf PC sales of around 200 million per year and make console sales look like a minor fad at 30 million a year (“Enterprise Purchases Give PC Sales an Upward Tug,” Global Sources; www. computerproducts.globalsources.com). The other major graphics board vendors—ATI, VIA, Intel, and Nvidia —have acknowledged this trend by announcing new processors that target the mobile market. Soon to be an allin-one device, some smart phones, such as Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and Handspring’s Treo, already offer Web and e-mail services. Add the now ubiquitous camera and MP3 capabilities to these devices, and it becomes obvious they will need a lot of computing power to run multimedia and game applications.

GAMING POWER Chip companies thus face the huge challenge of balancing low power consumption with the computing performance needed to transform polygons and push pixels. The ATI Imageon 2300, for example, uses 20 mW to sup122

Computer

Augmented cell phones may soon supplant desktops as the primary personal computing device. port a complete geometry-processing and pixel-rendering pipeline. Applying this power to a device that can last days on a single charge lets users play Quake on a Quarter VGA (QVGA) screen at 35 frames per second. Mobile phone manufacturers also want highly integrated chips to minimize costs and circuit board real estate. Hence, they must also combine audio and imaging functions with signal processing for wireless networking. For example, in September, Nvidia announced the highly integrated GoForce 3D 4500 WMP chip. Designed specifically for handsets, it offers the following features: • geometry processing for arcadequality 3D acceleration and gaming; • programmable shaders, bilinear and trilinear texture filtering, texture compression, support for six simultaneous textures, and a 40bit color pipeline for high-resolution detailed images; • power-saving technology for better battery life; and • support for the MPEG-4 and H.263 VHS-quality recording and playback formats. Published by the IEEE Computer Society

get, however. Intel recently unveiled Bulverde, its next-generation XScale chip for mobile handsets. Not only will it support wireless and photo image capture at 4 Mpixels, it also functions as a gaming platform. The Bulverde demo even included an Xbox game port, Moto GP.

WHEN TECHNOLOGIES CONVERGE The Nintendo generation has grown up but still wants to play all the time— and now their kids want to play, too. While it’s unlikely that anyone is rushing to put Microsoft Office on a cell phone, the success of camera phones shows that play is a service in universal demand. Color 2D games have been popular for ages, particularly in Japan, but 3D is now catching on with the introduction of mobile GPUs. Images from a game for the Nvidia GoForce (www. nvidia.com/docs/CP/10085/SPMark04. jpg) show just how fast mobile phone graphics are progressing. According to a recent report by media research consultancy Screen Digest, the global mobile gaming download market currently is a billiondollar industry. The lion’s share of this market comes from Japan and Korea —accounting for almost 80 percent of

the global market in 2003. Screen Digest forecasts that this market will be worth $6.4 billion by 2010 (www. screendigest.com).

New applications The marriage of mobility and networking also provides new opportunities. Multiplayer gaming is a natural for mobile games because each device is always connected via network technologies such as 802.11, 3G, or the general packet radio system (GPRS). Unfortunately, the diversity of carriers has combined with the diversity of platforms to slow the success of hits like JAMDAT’s Bejeweled Multiplayer (www.jamdat.com). This two-player game, currently available only through Sprint and Verizon, starts with the player either challenging another player or being matched with the first available opponent. When the player first encounters an opponent, that player sees the opponent’s skill level and win/loss record. The Bejeweled board materializes before the player and, in the right corner, the player also sees the opponent’s view of the game. Instead of moving right-to-left toward zero, the timer shows both players’ time remaining.

Massively mobile CipSoft’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game Tibia has been adapted to mobile phones, thus becoming the first mobile online roleplaying game worldwide. Tibia Micro Edition is available for the Nokia 7650 phone, which can display the game world at a resolution of 176 × 208 pixels using 4,096 colors. The phone uses a GPRS technique to connect to the central server (www.tibia.com). Equipped with Global Positioning System capability, mobile phones can provide new entertainment opportunities, as the Japanese game Mogi demonstrates. The game places a data layer over Tokyo and challenges gamers to complete an item hunt. Players move through the city, check their maps on the mobile phone screen, and view

nearby items they can pick up, as well as nearby players they can meet and trade with. But Mogi is 2D. When mobile 3D graphics mature, augmented reality capabilities will let the virtual and real worlds merge, as Columbia University’s Mobile Augmented Reality Systems Project demonstrates (www1. cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/ mars/mars.html).

Multiplayer gaming is a natural for mobile games because each device is always connected to a network. CHALLENGES Exploiting mobile phones for games still presents a formidable challenge that extends far beyond integration and power issues. Developers must design their applications for a plethora of development environments, from Qualcomm’s BREW to Sun’s Java M2E to WAP. Add multiple CPU targets to the mix, along with operating systems such as Symbian, Linux, and Windows CE, and developers quickly encounter combinatorial nightmares. Until recently, mobile games have lacked a common graphics application programming interface. Fortunately, the introduction of OpenGL ES—a graphics API for embedded systems— will provide one. In 2005, OpenGL ES 2.0 will include support for pixel shader programmability, making the performance of mobile GPUs closer to that of their desktop cousins. Another challenge involves designing a user interface that replaces console gamepad controls with a mobile phone’s keys. Although this process forces many compromises, the lucrative rewards that await those who succeed at implementing it have companies hard at work in this area. For example, Immersion, known for its vibrotactile gamepads that make players feel as if they can touch in-game objects, is port-

ing its technology to mobile handsets. Finally, mobile phones designed to host games must overcome their current limited display area. Until recently, these displays also lacked color and high-resolution graphics. The advent of 2.2-inch mobile-display amorphous silicon thin-film-transistor (TFT) LCD panels shows just how hungry this market is for high-quality graphics. These displays provide 320 × 240 pixel QVGA color resolution. With mobile phones joining LCD TVs as the main application targets for TFT displays, demand for color displays in multipurpose mobile phones is accelerating the trend toward TFT LCDs. These displays now make up 20 percent of all main displays, with analysts expecting them to capture 30 percent of the mobile phone market in 2005 (www.eetimes.com/sys/news/show Article.jhtml?articleID=51201517). s Karl Marx once noted, “merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.” The sheer size of the mobile market will have a qualitative impact on computing and the entertainment industry as cell phones become modern humanity’s most common technological device. Nokia predicts that 2 billion people, a third of the Earth’s population, will have mobile handsets by 2007. What happens when mobile phones wield the same processing power PCs have now? Where will we spend our time? In the fast lane, apparently. NTT DoCoMo’s experience with Internet phones in Japan indicates that their portability and mix of functions will help them supplant desktops. Given that people already try to read e-mail on their BlackBerrys while driving, these devices may give the terms mobile TV and mobile games dangerous new meaning. ■

A

Michael Macedonia is a senior scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Atlanta. Contact him at macedonia@ computer.org. December 2004

123