In-Tegra-ty
Bigger is not always better, was the message from Nvidia's Mike Rayfield, as the general manager for mobile told press at GTC that Intel's Moorestown would fall at least "a couple of generations behind" current Tegra architecture, exemplified by the Zune HD and Samsung's M1 YEPP.
"Intel is two years away from last year's [Tegra SoC] technology," said Rayfield, noting smugly that by the time the big blue chip firm had managed to catch up with Nvidia's Tegra capabilities today, the green machine would be a further three years ahead.
Discussing Nvidia's two main rivals in the space, Qualcomm and Intel, Rayfield described them dismissively as "relatively good competitors."
"Historically, Intel has done a great job building CPUs," said Rayfield, giving credit where it was due, but noting that Moorestown's crippling weakness would be its power consumption. Nvidia "developed Tegra from the ground up to do very low power media," Rayfield added, delivering another left hook to Intel by calling Atom nothing better than a "dehydrated PC."
"I have not seen or heard of any technology coming out of Intel that is even close to being capable of being in a mobile device," he stated, snarkily adding "everything Intel makes still needs to be plugged in, and it will for the foreseeable future."
Qualcomm, he admitted, was actually quite good at low-power but, he said, that was because the firm had been making modems all its life.
The aim, according to Rayfield, is for the next generation of Tegra chips to see a four-fold improvement in performance-per-watt, a target which sets the bar fairly high. He also commented the fact Tegra was primed to receive GPU-accelerated Adobe Flash, to make it a more attractive platform for online gaming.
Apparently the Zune HD and the Samsung player are the first of a plethora of products sporting Tegra, with an approximate 70 more in various stages of the pipeline, including car infotainment systems, smartphones, netbooks and IPTVs.
As for the Tegra smartphone revolution, Rayfield prophesised it would kick off towards the start of 2010, declaring "you'll see us in very common brands on common operators around the world, probably by the start of next year." He wouldn't be drawn into giving out any names, but did tell press the design wins would be from "carriers you recognise, brands you recognise and operating systems you recognise."
