14 DAY TRIAL // The Fermi architecture isn't the only thing that NVIDIA plans to put on display at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. The company seems to have serious plans for the mobile computing segment and apparently intends to introduce its second-generation Tegra system-on-chip products in January. The actual aim is for total Tegra revenues to reach $100 million by the end of fiscal year 2011.
“At CES we are going to make a major announcement about Tegra family. It is highly possible that we will see some very interesting form-factors coming out at the same time. [There will be products] shown by our partners using the next-generation Tegra device. You are going to see roll-outs and deployments of tablet PCs, smartbooks, netbooks, MIDs throughout the first half [of the year]; and then you will see major roll-outs of smartphones in the second half,” said Michael Hara, senior vice president of investor relations and communications at Nvidia, at Barclays Technology Conference last week.
Still, the GPU maker might see some complications in its endeavor, considering that it has practically no experience in non-branded business. The actual capabilities of the technology will be the only things that will decide its popularity, as mobile phone manufacturers don't advertise their products' components, nor do buyers really show any interest in knowing the exact build of their smartphones. Even so, the company is optimistic and hopes for the its revenues to be significantly impacted starting with 2010's second half.
The Tegra is quite unlike the products from Qualcomm or Texas Instruments (and others), which focus on integrating all computing and communications functions on a single chip in order to make it smaller and more affordable. The Tegra is aimed at “compute intensive” designs. NVIDIA believes that the demand is currently focused on compute intensive capabilities instead of integration.
“The main difference between what we are developing within the Tegra architecture compared to our competition is that we are building a computer on a chip. The baseband guys take a different approach. They talk about integration. What is ironic is that they talk about their advantage, which is the same exact argument we have in the PC space regards to Intel. The question that you have to ask yourself is based on what users want, what users demand, ‘is it a time to integrate technology or is it a time to innovate and make things better?’ Our premise is […] that this is a wrong time to be integrated and the right time to be compute-intensive,” stated Mr. Hara.
The Tegra 2 will be built using the low-power 40nm manufacturing process and feature both a stronger graphics technology and a dual-core ARM general-purpose processor. Even though details are still rather scarce, the company claims that the Tegra 2 will be twice as powerful as the first-generation SoC devices, which implies that it will also boast a faster memory
“We want to deliver a Web computing experience that is better than on your PC. Today, if you take your PC and go to the Internet, you want to see high-definition in everything. You want to have fast response times and switching between your windows, you want to see high-definition videos, you want to see high-definition images, so, your experience is about HD Internet. Our objective with Tegra is to deliver the same experience to your handheld devices,” explained the senior vice president of investor relations and communications at Nvidia.
The CES will reveal the exact capabilities of the technology and Tegra 2-based mobile devices will likely be released during the first half of 2010.