The company hopes that Kal-El will be more popular than Tegra 2

Dec 3, 2011 17:01 GMT  ·  By

Nvidia has high hopes for its recently launched Tegra 3 system-on-a-chip (SoC) device as in 2012 it plans to ship no less than 25 million such chips, which could make it more popular than the previous iteration of Tegra.

These SoC are supposed to go into smartphones, tablet PCs and automobiles, according to industry sources cited by the DigiTimes publication.

Nvidia’s goal is indeed impressive, but those in the industry doubt that the Santa Clara chip maker will be able to achieve it as its Tegra 2 system-on-a-chip failed to achieve the same 25 million target in 2011.

According to the same publication, Tegra 2’s low sales performance was due to its inability to capture enough share from the smartphone market, which is currently dominated by Qualcomm.

Although Nvidia still faces strong competition from players such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments with Tegra 3, the company seems to be confident that its early release will enable it to reach its 25 million shipping target.

Furthermore, in 2013 the company is aiming to achieve further growth with the launch of the first Windows on ARM (WoA) devices.

Nvidia’s Tegra 3 SoC is the industry’s first quad-core ARM-based mobile SoC and it packs four Cortex A9 cores based on an ARM architecture paired together with a fifth companion core built using low power process technology.

Nvidia chose this arrangement in order to increase the power efficiency of its design, as the companion core handles many of the tasks the device runs when in idle mode.

The chip was already used by Asus in the popular, but not yet available, Transformer Prime tablet, with other hardware makers, such as Acer and Lenovo, being expected to follow in 2012.