sed (and still are today) with the exception of Renesas (the SH mobile widely used in many Japanese FOMA phones). Essentially, there were two approaches to delivering performance and power efficiency. Vendors such as Intel and Samsung used fast clock speeds to get performance and then (using Intel as an example), implement voltage and frequency scaling to reduce power drain. Usually, the application processors clocked at a multiple of the original GSM clock reference on the basis that the devices would be used in dual-mode GSM/UMTS handsets. The Intel device frequency scaled from 156 to 312 MHz and the Samsung device scaled up to 533 MHz (13 times 13 MHz). Consider that most baseband processors ticked along at 52 MHz (3 times 13 MHz) this represented significant additional processor load being introduced to support multimedia functionality. Given the diversity of media processors being sold or sampled to handset manufacturers and the diversity of vendor solutions, there was an obvious need to try and standardise the hardware and software interfaces used in these devices and to provide some form of common benchmarking for processor performance. This resulted in the formation of MIPI (the Mobile Industry Processor Interface)4 alliance. This was established by TI, ARM, ST and Nokia as an industry standard for power management, memory interfaces, hardware/software partitioning, peripheral devices and more recently RF/baseband interfaces. 4 http://www.mipi.org/. Device-Centric Software In parallel, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium5 was established to work on a J2ME benchmark suite with a set of standardised processor tasks (image decoding, chess, cryptography) SO that processors could be compared in terms of delay, delay variability and multitasking performance. This work continues today. Part of the benchmarking process had to address the issue of video quality, which in turn was complicated by the fact that different vendors used different error-concealment techniques. One of the reasons GSM voice ca