• Tweet
• Email

China’s Academy of Sciences (ICT)  is working with US based Vivante to develop low power chips for netbooks. ICT is behind the MIPS-based Loongson CPU used in the Emtec Gdium netbook. And Vivante, which is an embedded graphics technology company, has agreed to work with ICT to develop GPUs for use in Chinese netbooks.

The partnership could help bring higher performance graphics to netbooks using Loongson or similar chips. The Emtec Gdium, for instance, uses a 900MHz Loongson CPU. And while the relatively low clock speed may help keep power consumption down and provide reasonable battery life, the pre-production units I played with at CES earlier this year weren’t going to win any awards for speed.

It’s possible that a good GPU would let software makers offload some of the graphics and user interface tasks to the GPU, thus speeding up overall performance. At the very least, a dedicated GPU should help improve video playback performance. NVIDIA’s Tegra platform, which bundles a low power ARM processor with an NVIDIA GPU shows just how much difference a good video card can make.

via Netbook News.de