It was not so long ago we heard about the Japanese semiconductor manufacturer Renesas but then it was only a low power microprocessor, which would be developed in collaboration with several major companies. Now, Renesas has launched its latest CPU based on an existing architecture, namely ARMS Cortex-A8. Renesas SH-Mobile APE4 is a so-called application processor operating at a speed of 1GHz and is targeted to the mobile market, particularly smartphones and other multimedia-oriented devices.

Renesas SH-Mobile APE4 in fact a multiplicity of computational circuits dedikerats just for multimedia management. Where we find particular support for 1080p playback with 30fps or why not 3D rendering for advanced 3D interfaces and games.The latter is handled by SGX2 PowerVR graphics chip that also supports HDMI output WXGA resolutions.

Besides mobile phones, we can imagine that Renesas new application processor also may find a place in the Smart Books. Where we already have seen prototypes with Qualcomm's Snapdragon CPU 1GHz that even this is based on the ARM architecture.