14 DAY TRIAL // Having lost the number one spot in today's high-performance consumer graphics card market, NVIDIA had to get more involved in one of its other graphics projects, one that hadn't been designed for the consumer market, and that provided an entirely different functionality. We are talking about Tegra, a “system-on-chip” (SoC) product, released by the Santa Clara-based chip maker earlier this year, and which is targeted at a market with an impressive demand of more than 1 billion processors per year.
If compared with the company's successful GeForce lineup, the new Tegra chip did not enjoy that much media attention. However, this doesn't mean that NVIDIA's product is unsuccessful. As a matter of fact, recent reports indicate that NVIDIA-powered dashboards are now used by major companies such as Daimler AG (Mercedes Benz), FIAT Group (Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Fiat, Lancia, Maserati), and V.A.G. group (Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Seat, Skoda, VW). Moreover, the green company is set on expanding its customer portfolio even further than that, TGDaily informs.
However, chances are these companies take no pleasure in being NVIDIA's personal test subjects, which is why they are likely to prefer proven technologies. What this actually means is that NVIDIA might have been using an already available graphics chip for its Tegra product, and not its latest technology. According to the same TGDaily, NVIDIA has decided to design Tegra using its GeForce 6 graphics subsystem, which can deliver support for DirectX 9.0c, and is capable of running multiple displays. However, for Audi, NVIDIA offered an upgrade daughter-board with a low-power, low-clocked GeForce 9600 graphics card.
It is believed that, in the future, Tegra will incorporate technologies and features from the company's current GTX 280 graphics chip. That product is likely to be based on TSMC's 32 nm low-power node, and to provide full support for CUDA and dual-precision FP64 processing.