14 DAY TRIAL // Last year, things seemed to be getting tougher for NVIDIA as Intel sued it over chipset manufacturing and AMD came out with DirectX 11 cards before its rival was ready to bring its own. Even the first-generation Tegra hadn't exactly performed as well as NVIDIA had hoped, having scored a number of design wins but not enough to be particularly noticeable. Recently, however, NVIDIA seems to be getting rather confident on the mobile front, with its next-generation Tegra system-on-chip looking ready to go out in force.
NVIDIA got its Tegra development team when it acquired MediaQ and PortalPlayer (in 2003 and 2007, respectively), after which it unveiled the first SoC family in 2008. Hoping that its new mobile platform will perform better than its predecessor, with 50 design wins already scored, NVIDIA recently ramped up its Tegra efforts by merging its development team with the one that used to make core-logic sets. As such, the company is rather enthusiastic about its future on the mobile device front.
“There are a ton of exciting opportunities for us to work on, and you can expect we'll allocate our resources appropriately. One of Nvidia’s great strengths is that we're nimble enough to redeploy resources quickly as business opportunities arise. Tegra has drawn an amazing response from the market,” said Bruce Chan, a spokesman for Nvidia’s Tegra business unit. “We continue to work closely with our partners and customers to support the 50+ Tegra products currently in development,” said Mr. Chan.
“It is clear that Tegra and Tegra-based devices have captured the imagination of so many people. The schedule for [actual] products is a function of how quickly our customers are ready to bring them to market,” the spokesman concluded.
NVIDIA did not disclose whether its 650 engineers concentrate on a broad line of off-the-shelf SoCs or if they focus on custom-made models.