14 DAY TRIAL // In order to get through the tough financial situation that the company is in, Acer plans to release quite a few innovative products by the end of this year, including a Tegra 2 powered notebook as well as an Ultrabook laptop.
According to Notebook Italia, the Tegra 2 powered device should be announced by the end of July, but no detailed specifications regarding its hardware are available at this time.
Currently, Nvidia is offering the Tegra 2 system-on-a-chip in four different editions, ranging from the Tegra 250 AP20H to the Tegra 250 3D T25.
All of these have a dual-core Cortex-A9 ARM processor at their heart, running at either 1GHz or 1.2GHz, which is paired with an ultra-low power (ULP) GeForce GPU with four pixel shaders and four vertex shaders.
This can be clocked between 300MHz and 400MHz and the chip also includes a single channel LPDDR2 600MHz or DDR2 667MHz memory controller.
Outside of the hardware used in this laptop, the other major question that remained unanswered is what operating system this device actually will run as Windows 7 isn't compatible with the ARM architecture.
This leaves Android and Linux as possible choices, but the former isn't optimized for notebook use, while the latter could prove to be just too much for the Nvidia Tegra 2 SoC.
However, the surprises don't stop here as for the end of this year, December to be more exact, Acer is preparing to release a notebook based on Intel's recently unveiled Ultrabook concept.
While no specifications area available at this point in time, Intel has defined the Ultrabook as a laptop that combines high performance, excellent responsiveness and security, in a slim and elegant chassis.
The Santa Clara chip giant expects this concept to capture 40% of the consumer laptop market by the end of 2012.