Tegra time
We last spoke to Mike Rayfield - who heads-up the Tegra side of things for NVIDIA - at Mobile World Congress a couple of months ago. Back then his focus was on tablets and Tegra 2, and that formed the majority of his presentation at NVIDIA's recent analyst day too.
Once more he stressed how ideal for tablets Tegra 2 is, with the first examples coming to market in Q3 of this year. "This is the year of the tablet," said Rayfield. "It's the next wave of computing." He echoed the comments of NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in defining tablets as the best devices for consuming media.
Regarding smartphones, Rayfield confirmed that Tegra will start to appear in them this quarter and that Tegra 2 will crop-up in smartphones launched in Q4 - including the next generation of Android devices.
On that topic, Rayfield had a bit of a mea culpa. "I missed the first wave of Android," he said. "The reality is I invested more heavily in Windows Mobile/CE." He still reckons that investment will pay off but he admitted that he had underestimated how quickly Android would take off. On the plus side, Rayfield said the Tegra 2 smartphones will come out only a year after OEMs first got access to the silicon. The equivalent turn-around for Tegra was more like two years.
Rayfield was no less keen to have a go at the competition than he was at MWC. He once more observed that he doesn't think integrating a modem into the SoC is a big deal as it's easy to add one as a separate component. "I do a lot of designs with Qualcomm [modems] and they're probably not thrilled about that," said Rayfield.
Intel wasn't mentioned but the other most prominent player in the SoC market right now - Texas Instruments - was. Rayfield pointed out that NVIDIA is bringing out a new generation of Tegra every year, while it is taking TI four years to get from OMAP 3 to OMAP 4. He also reckons NVIDIA has a year's advantage in terms of certain graphics/video technologies over Qualcomm and TI.
