A block diagram of the NovaThor U9500 platform. (Credit: ST-Ericsson)
Nokia has announced that it will be partnering ST-Ericsson for future Windows Phone (WP) devices. ST-Ericsson is a joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Ericsson, and produces the NovaThor platform for smartphones and tablets.
Like other products such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Nvidia's Tegra, ST-Ericsson's platform handles CPU and graphics processing for a smartphone. The current versions of NovaThor are all based on dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processors. Because of this, we think it is likely WP7 will support dual-core processors in a future update--all current WP7 devices have single-core processors. Nokia's first Windows Phone, the Lumia 800, uses a single-core 1.4GHz Snapdragon processor.
With this announcement, expect to hear more about ST-Ericsson mentioned in the same breath as the dominant players such as Qualcomm, Nvidia and Texas Instruments. Here's a quick rundown of what the top-of-the-line NovaThor U9500 platform has:
Dual-core Cortex-A9 ARM processorARM Mali 400 GPUDual camera supportSupports touchscreens up to WXGA (1,280 x 768) resolutionHSDPA up to 21Mbps
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