Riposte
For us, a big theme of this year's MWC 2010 has been the competing claims of the many companies that make the low-power chips designed to run mobile devices.
We spoke to Mike Rayfield - the GM of graphics giant NVIDIA's mobile business unit and he was not impressed by the claims made by his rivals. "You can get the full web with Tegra 2," he said, when we told him about our conversation with Intel. "Tegra 2 is the only ARM-based SoC that will bring you an uncompromised Internet experience."
In response to the specific Intel claim that you can't run Facebook games on any other chips, Rayfield showed us a demo of Farmville running on a tablet powered by Tegra 2. He also confirmed that mobile phones running both Tegra and Tegra 2 will begin shipping in the middle of this year.
Regarding the Qualcomm claim that its Snapdragon chips have an inherent advantage by integrating the modem chip into the main SoC, Rayfield was equally dismissive. "The modem is just a peripheral," he said, pointing out that none of the iPhone, the Palm Pre and the Motorola Droid run on chips with integrated modems and that the need for carrier qualification delays the rate at which new chips can be brought to market.
At CES, NVIDIA's focus for Tegra 2 was on tablets, and Rayfield is still big on this form-factor. "The design wins we're getting now are huge," he said, adding that the buzz around the iPad launch just served to increase interest. "We're getting a huge amount of interest from OEMs on tablets."
In particular, Rayfield was keen to demonstrate a brand-new Adobe Air app for viewing magazine content on a tablet. This is apparently the first such app to appear on an ARM-based processor. "I believe this is one of the killer apps for tablets," said Rayfield, concluding that the performance of Tegra 2 in tablets will be as good as a full-blown notebook.
