The iPhone packs a rather notable punch when it comes to CPU horsepower for a mobile computing device of its size and class.  The 620MHz Xscale-based ARM core in its chipset is no slouch–in fact it’s one of if not the most powerful extremely-low-wattage mobile processor out there.  But, that’s not to say that the iPhone is up to any and every computer gaming challenge.

Here, we look to the work of an Intel research group in Israel that is striving to develop technologies to allow mobile devices of modest power to run graphically tasking applications such as heavyweight MMORGPs like World of Warcraft and Second Life. 

Second Life and World of Warcraft are among the most prominent MMOGs. They demand lots of computing power – both from the CPU and Graphics. These demands overload any mobile device of today or near future, even including MIDs. By the time the mobile clients have caught up, the performance requirements for MMOGs will grow higher yet.

The 3D Streaming technology developed by Comverse and Intel computes and renders the MMOG content on a powerful backend server, then smartly compresses and streams the graphics onto a client. A network gateway designed by Comverse allows streaming over both WiMAX and 3G cellular networks. With advanced software optimizations including SSE usage, a single Xeon 5400 backend system can serve simultaneously up to 14 clients.

A demonstration video featuring Alexander Sterkin, Sr. SW Application Engineer in Intel’s Software & Solutions Group–but not featuring the iPhone or iPod touch, explains the project further.
 

This is an interesting technology to follow that may enable the iPhone or iPod touch to act as clients to games and applications more demanding than the platform would normally allow.

This year’s 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off with the launch of the iPhone 3G and demos of a number of new iPhone and iPod Touch games. We were hoping that Apple would finally provide some solid details on the exact launch of the iTunes App Store and also release developers from the somewhat vaguely termed Non Disclosure Agreement which accompanies the SDK.

During the keynote, however, Steve Jobs never gave an exact date for the launch of the iTunes App Store, but did say the iPhone 2.0 Firmware would be released in “early July”. The iTunes App Store has always been one of the major features of the 2.0 Firmware, so we should expect the app store launch at that time.

We’ve been told the App Store is still undergoing active development so Apple may not even know when the final version will be ready.

Also, there’s been reports that the latest 2.0 Firmware is “locked down like no phone has ever been.” So, Jailbreaking is currently out of the question.

Once the iTunes App Store launches, we suspect the popularity of Jailbreaking will decline, but some apps (such as emulators) will have to remain outside of the official App Store due to restrictions placed by Apple.

A developer behind the iPhone port of the FPS classic DOOM recently spoke out regarding the port project as well as iPhone development in general.

Developer Psychochromatic explains: “Looking at the hardware specs, I knew iPhone would be able to play a simple game like Doom no problem as it was open-source and already ran on the click-wheel iPod running Linux. I knew Stepwhite, who I work with on Mac projects, and as he’d just bought himself an iPhone and was working with the unofficial tool-chain I jokingly told him he had one week to port Doom to iPhone, and all it had to do was run; he didn’t have to implement controls. One week later, he proudly linked me to his Doom port homepage.”

The first build of Doom saw 15,000 downloads on the project site alone, even without a way to control the game. Once controller input had been included that version received over 25,000 downloads.

Behind the ease of development lies the iPhone’s inherent support for a full scale OS. “The iPhone runs OS X. It’s a full UNIX system in your pocket, with brilliant Objective-C frameworks that make coding beautiful and powerful applications a dawdle,” explains Psychochromatic.

Psychocromatic is not the first developer to expound the virtues of the iPhone’s rich, versatile, open development environment.  While writing iPhone apps was once a challenge, Apple’s release of the free iPhone SDK has made such projects “trivial.”

Apple’s iTunes App Store launches in June and the list of games that will be available at launch grows daily.  Stay tuned to keep up to date on just what download to expect on launch day.

Apple has just posted the fourth beta version of the iPhone SDK for download.  Among other improvements, this release brings the notable inclusion of OpenGL ES support in the iPhone simulator.  Developers can now test, tune, and debug their OpenGL ES code with ease, which is great news for the millions of us anxiously clutching our iPhones in anticipation of the June launch of the iTunes App Store.

OpenGL ES (OpenGL for Embedded Systems) is defined and promoted by the Khronos Group, an industry consortium interested in open graphics and multimedia APIs.

OpenGL® ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration. OpenGL ES includes profiles for floating-point and fixed-point systems and the EGL™ specification for portably binding to native windowing systems. OpenGL ES 1.X is for fixed function hardware and offers acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X enables full programmable 3D graphics.

OpenGL ES is the official graphics API of the Symbian OS and Android mobile platforms and is also supported by the Playstation 3.