Take your tablets
The moment of truth is rapidly approaching for Tegra - NVIDIA's ARM-based SoC (system on chip). Like its PC rival, Intel, it's coming late to a market currently dominated by the likes of Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. Furthermore Apple, one of its PC partners, has decided to make its own SoC - the A4 - rather than push any further business NVIDIA's way.
So it's fitting that NVIDIA's out-spoken CEO - Jen-Hsun Huang - should be focusing on Tegra with latest public pronouncements. Having devoted a chunk of a recent analyst call to Tegra, Huang spoke laptopmag.com on the eve of the Netbook Summit, with the interview soon moving onto tablets and Tegra 2.
He started by addressing whether tablets are the new netbooks. "The netbook was first, but the tablet is the new generation of leisure computers," said Huang. "In the beginning people just used these devices to surf the web, and if the performance wasn't great when they accessed video, or high-definition Flash, they were generally understanding.
"Now the iPad is out, and pretty soon Tegra 2 tablets will be out, and you'll see high-definition video and Flash, as well as people reading magazines and newspapers on a tablet. And consumers will no longer understand why the netbook can't do it."
Huang was asked if he was anxious that these Tegra tablets hadn't made an appearance yet. "I'm getting very anxious, but the answer is actually very simple: Whenever the operating system ships," he said, referring to Android optimised for tablets. "And the reason why Android makes sense is because in the tablet you need a marketplace. There's no Chrome marketplace."
Asked to comment on the Apple iPad and its A4 SoC, Huang was cautious, buy his standards, no doubt mindful of the relationship that still exists between the companies for MacBooks. But he reckons there's plenty of room for tablets other than the iPad and that Tegra 2 has distinct advantages over the A4, such as a dual-core CPU, better graphics and Flash support.
