Nothing from NVIDIA, yet
Some of the more widespread speculation late last week concerned NVIDIA's long-awaited Tegra system on a chip (SoC), its very low power platform, based on ARM 11 designs, intended for use in smartphones and the next generation netbooks.
NVIDIA was making a fair bit of noise about Tegra at this year's Computex, but wouldn't commit to specific commercially-available design wins or release dates. In the nearly two months since the show, no more information has been forthcoming so, as ever, the vacuum has been filled by rumour and speculation.
The most significant so far was from laptopmag.com, which claims to have received a confirmation from Samsung that it is developing an upcoming device based on Tegra. The headline implies the device is a phone, but there's no obvious reason why it shouldn't be a netbook either.
That leads us on to rumour number two, from semiaccurate.com, that NVIDIA has given the codename ‘Firefly' to its netbook prototype, and that we can expect to see design wins, probably from relatively obscure rebadging operations, in September.
The amount of noise in general about ARM ecosystem based products is likely to ramp up towards the second half of this year as the likes of Qualcomm and Texas Instruments announce smartphone and netbook/smartbook design wins for their own SoC products. It should be fun.
