14 DAY TRIAL // Recent events on the mobile market have stirred a great deal of discussions, especially now that Intel has made another attempt at grabbing a portion of the smartphone market. The Santa Clara, California-based CPU maker unleashed the Atom Z6xx series of mobile processors, which supposedly bring both higher performance and lower power consumption than previous solutions. Of course, such a move is bound to cause a reaction among competitors, and it appears that ARM is not the only party that has something to say.
This time around, it is NVIDIA that bluntly stated there is no way for the Z6 to even put up a good fight in the smartphone and tablet segment. This response is not completely unexpected, considering the GPU maker is still battling Intel over rights to make chipsets and, thus, is not exactly inclined towards being supportive. What the NVIDIA CEO said in an interview with Laptopmag is that Intel is still a long way off from reaching a reasonably low wattage.
“It’s not possible,” said NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang when asked if there was any way for the Z6 Moorestown chips to be competitive. “You could give an elephant a diet but it’s still an elephant. And when they think about power they think reducing from 20 watts down to 5 watts down to 4 watts down to 2 watts is really good. But you and I both know that in a mobile phone you need to be in a hundred milliwatts, two hundred milliwatts. So they’re still ten times away.”
Naturally, the chief executive makes a point of stating that Tegra 2 is already superior, in terms of both performance and efficiency, to Intel's solution and that it is unlikely for the Moorestown platform to catch up, since the Tegra 2 successor (Tegra 3) might make it to market as early as next year. NVIDIA also says the iPad set the performance bar too low by not offering support for Adobe Flash. Of course, whether there is enough strength behind these arguments will be proven when Tegra smartphones and tablets actually debut, which shouldn't take too long, not with Computex around the corner.