Windows Phone Thoughts: Sony Will Use Own Chip for New Handheld

"Sony Corp announced the first handheld computer to carry the company's own microprocessor Friday, signaling dissatisfaction with existing chips from others. Sony's new CLIE personal digital assistant, due to ship in September, will also mark the company's entry into wireless (news - web sites) communication. The new line will be optimized for audio files and video — commercial movies as well as personal clips that Sony thinks people will want to share — while draining as little battery power as possible, said Masanobu Yoshida, president of the company's handheld computing company. Current Sony CLIEs have Intel microprocessors. Sony promises smoother video and longer battery life in the new models — 16 hours for continuous playback of music or five hours for video. Performance is to double with an attachable battery pack."

This is a fascinating development - in the desktop world, every OEM is beholden to Intel or AMD, although VIA is making a play with their new low-heat chip. In the Pocket PC world, there was once a choice between MIPS, SH3, and ARM processors, all from different vendors. The resources required to test three flavours of the Pocket PC OS was slowing things down however, so they decided to focus on the ARM instruction set. That meant it was Intel only, and thus we suffered through the dismal performance of the XScale PXA250. But now that Samsung has announced the fastest ARM processor yet, things are starting to look interesting.

There are a lot of different companies making mobile processors, because no one is truly the king in that realm yet. I wonder if we'll see other big Pocket PC OEMs like HP and Toshiba making their own CPUs, backing away from Intel?