NVIDIA, the leading manufacturer of graphic processors, has recently announced its newest line of graphic processors named Tegra. These new products are designed to fit the technical requirements of the next generation of ultra portable computing devices, an area in which Intel is already present with its latest Atom processors.

So far, NVIDIA has made available two models from the Tegra lineup. Dubbed Tegra 600 and Tegra 650, these processors are said to be "computers on a chip" that NVIDIA plans to use in order to take on Intel's Atom.

The two chips from Intel and NVIDIA have a single thing in common and that is their small form factor. Apart from that, these two chips come built on very different architectures, namely x86 and ARM 11 for the Atom and Tegra, respectively. The Tegra is said to offer a better power usage ratio as compared to Intel's Atom, which requires far more than that. With only 1-watt power usage, the Tegra was able to output a HD 720p video on a LCD monitor without any problems whatsoever.

NVIDIA showed during a demonstration Tegra's architecture capabilities working with ARM, a new code that doesn't rely on x86 architecture. Ian Drew gave a key speech on how well ARM is now being taken up allowing NVIDIA graphic processor based MIDs to easily view just as many products as x86 is now able to. Major contributors to this were Microsoft, Adobe and Mozilla.

According to a benchmark that was shown during the demonstration, ARM was able to load some websites faster and some websites slower than its x86-based competitor. Both chips were using 800MHz powered systems for the benchmark.

The price range for the chips is expected to run between $200 and $250. Tegra is NVIDIA's first product that aims to provide a better alternative to one of Intel's products.