3Dlabs Semiconductor, a company focused on developing chips for mobile graphics applications, announced this week its first media processor, which is also the world’s first handheld media processor capable of H.264 content playback. Potentially such device allows to create mobile devices capable of processing high definition videos, such as those distributed using Blu-ray and HD DVD discs.

“Our engineering teams were asked to deliver a breakthrough in handheld media processing and the DMS-02 shows we have achieved just that. The ability to playback a full 720p resolution H.264 video on your HDTV from a portable device consuming less than 1W is an incredible achievement. Combine that with rendering 3D navigation at 30fps, capturing and encoding H.264 video at D1 and performing 4.8GFLOPS of compute and you have a real testament to the architecture,” said Hock Leow, president of 3Dlabs Semiconductor.

The DMS-02 incorporates 24 floating-point processing elements, dual ARM 926EJ 200MHz cores, multi-level caches, three bi-directional video stream ports, 32 or 64-bit mobile memory for up to 1.6GB/s bandwidth and peripheral interfaces to LCDs, CMOS sensors, IDE disks, USB OTG, Flash memory and Audio DACs. The device is OS independent with the first Software Development Kits supporting embedded Linux 2.6.

3Dlabs DMS provides support for a broad set of media processing CODECs, APIs and Libraries including H.264, MPEG2, Microsoft WMA and WMV, MP3, AAC, OpenGL ES and Image capture.

The DMS-02 is the first implementation of the 3DlabsDMS architecture, which scales from mobile handsets to broadcast quality set-top systems.

“We believe this architecture has the ability to scale and address the rich digital media content that consumers are constantly demanding in low powered mobile devices,” Mr. Leow said.

The DMS-02 is available now for customer evaluation and is priced at $40 in 1000 quantities.