14 DAY TRIAL // According to the latest news on the Web, Santa Clara-based graphics chip maker Nvidia is hard at work to release to the market the second iteration of its Tegra computer-on-a-chip next year. Moreover, it seems that the upcoming silicon solution will be capable of delivering almost two times the performance level offered by the current version of Tegra.
As many of you might already know, Tegra hasn't surfaced on the market just yet, although it should become available along with Zune HD as soon as this fall. Even so, it seems that Nvidia is gearing up for the development of Tegra 2, and sources with the graphics maker are reported to have stated that the chip should be able to go head-to-head with the currently available laptop configurations.
It should be rather interesting to see what devices will come to the market with the future Tegra 2, especially since it should be twice as powerful as its predecessor, according to Crunch Gear. If we were to make suppositions, we could easily place the chip either inside regular laptops (given the performance levels it can deliver) or in smaller devices, such as netbooks or smartphones.
The idea of having Tegra 2 included in future smartphones or netbooks could be more close to reality than one might think. The current iteration of the chip has been already spotted running Windows CE, and it seems that it can do quite well in netbooks. At the same time, Tegra was already rumored to be included in a series of smartphones that should come to the market before the end of the ongoing year.
“Tegra is a strategic line of products for NVIDIA. The world is going mobile and expectations are for low power always on, always connected and powerful devices that can do HD is growing rapidly,” stated Igor Stanek, product PR manager at Nvidia, in a recent interview with Softpedia. In case it is indeed able to provide two times the performance of Tegra 1, the upcoming Tegra 2 will be a great product for the mobile market.