Qualcomm struts its mobile gaming stuff

SAN DIEGO -- Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) may be shaking up the smartphone processor market with its highly touted Tegra graphics chips, but at Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ:QCOM) annual Uplinq conference today, CEO Paul Jacobs relished the fact that Qualcomm beat Nvidia on its own turf. When Sony Ericsson (NYSE:SON, NASDAQ:ERIC) selected a vendor to power the mobile incarnation of the Sony PlayStation, the Xperia Play, it didn’t tap the king of graphics and gaming engines, Nvidia. Rather it selected Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform.

At Uplinq this year it was easy to forget that Qualcomm’s primary business is selling phone modems. During his opening keynote, Jacobs mostly focused on Qualcomm’s growing multimedia and operations businesses, particularly the success of the Snapdragon applications processor line, as smartphones proliferate and in spite of mounting pressure from the competition. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play win is a key one for Qualcomm, showing Snapdragon and its accompanying Adreno graphics processor can scale to the most sophisticated gaming and multimedia devices.

In addition to running in many Android phones and tablets, Snapdragon has monopolized the emerging Windows Phone 7 market and is embedded in every one of HP’s (NYSE:HPQ) new WebOS smart devices. Qualcomm’s single-, dual-, and eventually quad-core Snapdragon (CP: Qualcomm revs up Snapdragon) not only have the raw processing power these devices need, Jacobs said, but they also beat out competing platforms in power consumption—a key consideration when dealing with limited battery life.

While Qualcomm uses the ARM instruction set, it designs its own ARM architecture rather than use an off-the-shelf ARM core, allowing it to optimize the multipurpose architecture specifically for the low-power requirements of mobility. That produces a 50% to 70% power savings over other processors, Jacobs said. Furthermore, Qualcomm is developing asynchronous computing technology for its multi-core processors, which will put extraneous cores to sleep when computing requirements are low. That will further increase power efficiency, Jacobs said.

Competition has been fierce in the processor marke, pitting Qualcomm against old rival Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN) and relative newcomer Nvidia in a race to develop the most powerful smartphone multimedia engines. Lately the competition has become one marked by which vendor can cram the most cores into its device—a race that Nvidia appeared to winning before Qualcomm unveiled its new Krait processor at Mobile World Congress.

But Jacobs said that the core contest had become a red herring. So much attention has become focused on dual-and quad-core architectures when real performance is dictated by their design not their numbers, he said. “Our single-core products beat out dual-core products,” Jacobs said. “[Measuring performance] is more than just counting the cores on the chips.”

To drive its mobile gaming point home Qualcomm is doing a little self-promotion, announcing at Uplinq a set of 100 games from multiple developers specifically optimized for the Snapdragon platform. Qualcomm is calling the program Game Pack, which at first blush appears to be an imitation of the Tegra Zone showcase Nvidia uses to promote its own processors’ capabilities. Qualcomm, however, said that the games themselves will be available individually through normal channels—Android Market and developer stores.

While Jacobs didn’t focus solely on Snapdragon, his speech consistently led back to the platform as he highlighted new multimedia and entertainment technologies and initiatives that made use of powerful processing engines. Jacobs asked the audience to don 3D glasses to show off Qualcomm and its partners’ latest 3D gaming and multimedia projects. Game developers demoed Qualcomm’s AllJoyn proximal link technology (CP: Qualcomm gets proximal) with a real-time gaming session between two handsets using a direct peer-to-peer technology.

Jacobs also devoted a lot of time to its latest efforts in augmented reality, a program that just got off the ground with the release of a software developer’s kit earlier this year. Using the phone’s camera “an extension of our eyes,” augmented reality can project 2D and 3D images into the surrounding landscape. Dreamworks demoed two AR initiatives accompanying the release of its feature film Kung Fu Panda 2: a DVD box which will play the movie’s trailer when viewed through camera lens of an AR-enabled phone and an application that allows a user to project the film’s animated characters into the a digital photo.

“We’re quickly moving from a state of interacting with a device to something more immersive,” Jacobs said. “We’re really only at the early stages of what the mobile device can do for us.”