NVIDIA's Tegra has gained an impressive amount of popularity over the course of the last few months, especially for having powered Microsoft's highly appreciated Zune HD media player. On that note, the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker is preparing to update its Tegra family of processors with the much-rumored introduction of the Tegra 2 chip. According to recent reports on the said processor, the chip is due out sometime next year, bringing along double the computational and graphics performance of its predecessor.

In a recent news article on Fudzilla, NVIDIA is said to be preparing the launch of its updated Tegra 2 chip, which is currently scheduled to arrive in 2010. The new chip will be based on an ARM 9 dual-core processor, a design feature that is expected to double its performance, by comparison with its predecessor. As expected, the company is targeting the smartphone market, although the chip might do just as fine in other segments, including the automotive industry, the music-player segment or any other one where a small-sized, performance-capable computational chip might be of use.

NVIDIA has already announced its big plans for the Tegra chip, with the company's CEO confirming that it expects the Tegra chip to account for half of the revenues in the next few years. Meanwhile, there is a number of reports that claim NVIDIA's growing interest in the CPU market, especially since Intel won't let the graphics chip maker design supporting chipsets for its upcoming processors. With the increasing popularity of small-sized, portable PCs, such as netbooks or smartbooks, Tegra might just be NVIDIA's window into the CPU market.

Although the performance and features of the Tegra 2 chip are yet to be unveiled, NVIDIA still has to worry about the competition, with Qualcomm and Texas Instruments also working on their next-generation family of ARM-based processors.