DailyTech - NVIDIA Buys Hybrid Graphics

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IT NVIDIA Buys Hybrid Graphics
Tuan Nguyen (Blog) - March 23, 2006 12:43 PM

4 comment(s) - last by Zoomer.. on Mar 25 at 8:23 PM

NVIDIA on mobile tech buying bonanza

NVIDIA has announced its acquisition of Hybrid Graphics, a Finnish company that develops graphics products for cell phones and the automotive market. We previously reported that NVIDIA acquired Pace Soft Silicon, which also develops graphics products for the mobile market. NVIDIA will be combining the software expertise from Pace Soft Silicon with the design and ASIC expertise from Hybrid Graphics.

In a statement, NVIDIA's CEO said:

Over the next decade, billions of handheld devices will be sold and for many, they are likely to become their most important computing device. These powerful and multi-function handheld devices will require rich graphics and by combining with the recognized leader in handheld graphics software, we are positioned to accelerate the adoption of graphics by offering the handheld industry a range of solutions from software to IP to GPUs.

Under the acquisition, Hybrid will continue to function independently, but as an arm of NVIDIA. Hybrid's products will also continue to be sold under its own brand name since it already has a well established market with large customers: BitBoys, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson just to name a few.

Prior to the announcement, NVIDIA was already a channel partner for Hybrid. More information can be found here.

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Finnish graphics-companies

By PrinceGaz on 3/23/2006 9:06:28 PM , Rating: 3

As soon as I read that it was a finnish graphics-company, I immediately thought of BitBoys, legendary developers of the most powerful graphics-cards ever, at least if they ever actually made any.

I still think it's a shame BitBoys stopped producing imaginary graphics-cards for the PC market as it was always entertaining to read about their latest and greatest that was so many times more powerful than anything which existed, but which you knew would never actually be manufactured :)

RE: Finnish graphics-companies

By granulated on 3/24/2006 7:13:04 AM , Rating: 2

...and their website was lush (used to take a while to load up on first visit in the days of 56K!)

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RE: Finnish graphics-companies

By Zoomer on 3/25/2006 8:23:55 PM , Rating: 2

How much did they get from investors? Could any AT/DT editors comment on that? :)

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Upgrade that resolution

By CryptoQuick on 3/23/2006 7:56:44 PM , Rating: 2

Soon, a VGA, 640x480 pixel screen will be seen on high-end phones. 320x240 (QVGA) resolution displays are already commonly seen on phones nowadays. Any phone without one, I won't even consider thinking about. Of course, VGA would probably be about the upper limit for my eyes on a 2-inch screen, but the quality of that screen, along with the possiblities for software using that screen, would make it very attractive.

For those phones, they'll need better graphics processing capability. Not only with higher resolution, there will be want of 3D graphics, even for the GUI. Megapixel-plus image processing is slow on my phone. There will be need of h.264/AVC decoding. Finally, there's gaming, which is very processing intensive, but is profitable for carriers. All this on a higher-resolution display on future phones... There's no doubt there will need to be more powerful GPUs, no matter how small, on portable devices such as phones. I can understand why nVidia would wish to capitalize on this market.