AMD on Tuesday said it has sold the core of its Imageon mobile graphics business to Qualcomm. The roughly $65 million deal gives the chip design company the intellectual property rights, the option of hiring related AMD workers, and other resources. It effectively puts AMD out of the handheld video category, leaving the company to focus on desktop and notebook graphics for its Radeon line.
AMD today rolled out a set of upgrades to its Imageon graphics and processor chips that it says should help drive newer handhelds, especially advanced devices such as smartphones or personal navigators. The company's new Z460 is one of the few phone-sized graphics chipsets to include the same kind of visual technology as the Xbox 360; the device is capable of handling custom visual shaders and should produce graphics more closely resembling what has been seen on game consoles in the past, AMD touts. A simpler chipset, the Z180, will also be available for 2D video and the vector graphics often found in GPS systems.
