NEC companion chip claims 50-hour music playback
NEC Electronics America has just announced a new audio processor that will be music to the ears of those who enjoy pumping tunes on their cellphones- the uPD99910 integrates a CPU and a DSP to relieve most of the strain on a phone's main processor during playback, which is said to provide up to a whopping 50 hours of continuous battery life. The companion chip requires only a small amount of onboard storage for music playback code, as it can access applications from the primary processor's flash memory. Also part of the package are SD card support including SD-Binding (for transferring content between devices), along with the Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) flavor of DRM that should make it popular with carriers and device manufacturers and frustrating to the rest of us.
