14 DAY TRIAL // It is already clear that, if anything, NVIDIA's Tegra 2 has caused some waves on the market, and a recent rumor involving Samsung might even push the prospective success of the SoC to a whole new level.
Over the years, many rumors arose saying various things about what companies are planning on doing on the IT market.
This once, a rumor that may or may not be true, and is possibly at least partially erroneous, has emerged regarding supposed dealing between NVIDIA and Samsung.
As end-users know, NVIDIA has been selling the Tegra 2 mobile SoC for months, and tablets and smartphones based on it have either started selling or at least been revealed.
Recently, it begun to be said that Samsung would adopt the processor for its next Galaxy Tab smartphone.
However, the Orion chip, which should succeed Samsung's Hummingbird, will be five times better at graphics over its predecessor, even supporting 1,080p encoding and decoding at 30 fps (possible thanks to the Mali 400 GPU).
That said, one might not think that Samsung has all that much of a reason to switch to NVIDIA's solution.
Nevertheless, a recent post on Barron's implies that, not only does Samsung plan to use Tegra 2, but it actually set up a deal already.
What's more, the deal is not just any order, but one that might end up having Samsung pay NVIDIA more than the latter's total full-year 2011 estimate of Tegra revenue.
In other words, while NVIDIA expects to get about $275 million from its Tegra 2 business, Samsung's order supposedly amounts to between $250 and $350 million.
All in all, while anything is possible, the probability of such a large sum changing hands over Tegra 2 is not exactly high. Still, in the end, whether or not this deal does happen remains to be seen.