9. SiRFprima does GPS, CPU and 3D graphics

SiRF’s SiRFstar III is by far the most used chip in navigation device antennas. While waiting to launch the fourth edition of the popular chip, probably in 2009, SiRF decided to launch a multipurpose CPU for mobile devices. SiRFprima merges together a mobile CPU, a GPS chip and a multimedia accelerator for 2D/3D graphics and video decoding.

Have you ever wondered what an integrated GPS antenna looks like?

The GPS part support 64 channels and includes SiRFInstantFixII, a feature that enables satellite fixes in a matter of a few seconds, and that is appearing in many of the latest PNDs. The location engine is optimized for simultaneously tracking of GPS and Galileo Satellites.

The CPU part is a full ARM11 with a vector floating point unit and 128KB of L2 cache. The graphic accelerator chip is compliant with OpenGL ES 1.1, and has a throughput of 4 million triangles per second with a 350 Mpixel per second fill rate.

sirfstarIII_chips.jpg

The same chip, SiRFstarIII , three years ago (upper), two years ago (middle) and 2007 (lower).

The multimedia part decodes MPEG2/MPEG4/H.264/WMV D1@30 fps. While encoding, it may use the MPEG4/H.264 format @30 fps.