14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA's founder and president answered some questions and ended up revealing quite a few things, and this extends to more than confirming its Tegra roadmap.
The smartphone and tablet market is a segment that NVIDIA really wants to have a big stake in, since it was denied x86 chipset development.
The Tegra 2 has already proven to be quite the success, so it stands to reason that expectations are high for Tegra 2 and beyond.
Speaking in an interview recently, the Santa Clara, California-based company's founder and president Jen-Hsun Huang outlined his thoughts on the ARM architecture, Microsoft's approach to it and NVIDIA's own past, present and future exploits.
One thing he admits to was that it was not a very good idea to go head-to-head with Intel when the two were making their early raids on the mobile chip market.
Now, NVIDIA is more focused on the aspects of visual computing and mobile computing, which makes Qualcomm, not Intel, its main competitor.
Huang addressed the issue of Windows 8 support for ARM as well, stating that Microsoft should try to get it on tablets first, to make it clear in users' minds that slates aren't PCs and should be approached accordingly.
"It's important for [Microsoft] not to position these as PCs. From a finesse perspective -- I can't speak on their behalf -- but I would come out with tablets first with Windows on ARM. It helps to establish that this isn't a PC. Will yesterday's Office run on tomorrow's Windows on ARM PC? Will a new version of Office run on tomorrow's Windows on ARM tablets? Both questions are about legacy, and both are about Office," he said.
"The actual implementation of it is radically different. I see no reason to make Office 95 to run on Windows on ARM. I think it would be wonderful, absolutely wonderful -- I'd say, as someone who uses Windows -- it would be almost a requirement to me that [the ARM] device runs Windows interoperably. If Office runs on Windows on ARM -- it's the killer app. Everything else is on the web."