Buried between a general company overview and several product launches, Nvidia yesterday launched the world’s first graphic processor with megapixel camera support at Computex Taipei 2003. The processor is the company’s first step into the handheld market.

Company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang joined four other Nvidia executives at the presentation. The vice president and general manager of handheld products at Nvidia, Phil Carmack, introduced the GoForce 2150 chip for the PDA and handset market. He explained how the new chip supports handhelds equipped with high-resolution (up to 1.3-megapixel) digital cameras, offers the broadest panel support and consumes the least power among competing chips.

In addition to claiming these advantages, Carmack compared the performance of the GoForce to current handheld solutions. While power consumption was claimed to be 15-24 times less (better), performance (in frames per second) was said to be 22 to 110 times faster. It was also claimed that the new chip’s graphics engine outperformed the Game Boy Advance by over 25 times.

The chip solution is used in Mitac International’s Mio 8380 smartphone and a number of feature-packed phones made by LG Electronics (LGE) and Pocket PCs from Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Dell. Nvidia had products from all of these companies on display. There was an additional smartphone, rumored to be from a leading motherboard vendor, also in the presentation.

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