Gunning for Apple
Huang revealed that by the end of the year we can expect to see some Android phones running Tegra 2 to hit the market, although he wouldn't reveal who would be making them.
One handset-maker he was happy to single-out, however, was Apple - identifying its A4 SoC as Tegra 2's primary competitor, as opposed to Qualcomm's Snapdragon or TI's OMAP (Intel's Moorestown wasn't even mentioned).
"Although it made sense for the first-generation androids to use available phone processors, the follow-on generations of Android are really going to go after performance," said Huang. "And iPhones are out there, the iPhone 4G is coming, the iPad is obviously a revolutionary product. The bar is pretty high for all of the mobile players, and so they need a processor that can keep up with the A4. If not, be much better than what the A4 can do because they have to take on the leader in the space.
"And so I think the second-generation Tegra has been doing incredibly well because Android is doing incredibly well. So we're going to come to market with the second-generation Tegra with the third-generation Android."
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time NVIDIA has publicly spoken so strongly of a focus on Android for Tegra. Apple has its own chip, Nokia is in bed with Intel and Microsoft has thrown NVIDIA's commitment back in its face, so that only really leaves Android anyway, but now it's official.
There are a couple of other mobile platforms out there: BlackBerry and WebOS, and we wouldn't be at all surprised to see NVIDIA court HP quite heavily over its newly acquired OS, which is expected to appear in a tablet before long.
