14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that NVIDIA is about to do great things on the market for Windows on ARM products, thanks to the advantages that only experience can provide.
Intel may have managed to lock NVIDIA out of the PC chipset market, but the experience accumulated by the latter in that field is something it can't take away.
Not long ago, Intel said that it will make a very good pair with Windows 8 and, on the personal computing front, that is probably true.
The tablet market, on the other hand, is a different story, since the operating system's support for the ARM architecture is a point in favor of those companies who already are well involved in the tablet market.
After all, though Windows 8 will be a direct competitor to Android, it will be just another means to boost the slate businesses of ARM platform and product makers.
Thus, NVIDIA might very well do what Digitimes says and become prominent, if not preeminent, on the market of WOA devices, where WOA stands for Windows on ARM.
The aforementioned experience in making PC chipsets (plus its own BIOS development team) will play a big role in this, which leaves software development as the only remaining barrier to surmount.
Like Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, NVIDIA has hardware expertise, but is lacking in the software department, so it needs to recruit more developers.
This has to be one of the reasons for the many job openings we mentioned yesterday (NVIDIA already has over 7,000 employees).
Up to now, the Tegra platform of ARM SoCs has proven quite successful, even though Tegra 1 wasn't very popular, since there were no tablets at the time and the chip was outdone on the phone market by the other ARM products available then.
Tegra 2 was the great success and, now, Tegra 3 (Kal-El) claims to be even better (by about five times).
By the time WOA devices show up in earnest, NVIDIA might have Tegra 4 almost ready (or already out) so it would be a surprise if the Santa Clara company didn't maintain a high profile there.