Ever tried watching Hulu or YouTube on a netbook? If your machine didn’t crash immediately, it probably choked and struggled its way through the clip. Nvidia’s latest system-on-a-chip, Tegra, could make your next netbook a veritable video powerhouse.
“It is basically a full motherboard on a PCB (printed circuit board) the size of a pack of gum,” says Mike Rayfield, general manager of the handheld GPU, or graphics processing unit, business at Nvidia.
At the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan, Nvidia said PC manufacturers such as Foxconn, Wistron, Pegatron and Mobinnova plan to release Tegra-based netbooks by the end of the year.
Tegra is the latest of several attempts by chip companies to carve out a slice of the rapidly growing netbook market, where sales are expected to nearly double to 21 million units this year from the year before. Most netbooks run Intel’s Atom processor, which isn’t powerful enough to handle the demands of video or audio playback. Nvidia, whose GPUs are optimized for rendering video, animation and graphics, is betting it can fix that. However, to get a foothold in netbooks it will compete not only with Intel but also Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, a chipset that promises better power management, and Via’s Nano. The Nano appears in only a few netbooks but powers the Samsung NC20 to surprisingly good results in Wired.com’s review.
Tegra includes an 800-MHz ARM CPU, a high-definition video processor, an imaging processor, an audio processor and an ultralow-power GeForce GPU in a single package. The different processors can be used together or independently while consuming very little power, says the company. And devices based on Tegra could be available to consumers by the end of the year.
“This is the most advanced ultralow-power computer on a chip,” says Rayfield. “We think it will bring the high-resolution experience we are used to on notebooks and desktop computers to netbooks and other mobile internet devices.”
Last year Nvidia launched Ion, a family of chips that aim to bring better graphics capability to low-cost computing devices. Tegra is completely different, says Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.
“Ion is a chipset that pairs graphics capabilities with an Intel Atom CPU,” he says. “Tegra takes the graphics core and combines it with a CPU that is not an x-86 class.”
The Tegra family will include the Tegra 650 processor, which can run Windows Embedded CE or Google Android, and the Tegra APX 2500 processor, targeted at Windows Mobile smartphones.
The idea is to make mobile devices more powerful, capable of running high-definition video, even as they improve on power efficiency, says Rayfield. The Tegra 650 can offer about 130 hours of audio processing and 30 hours of high-definition video playback.
“What we are talking about here is that with Tegra you can get 120 times longer battery life while listening to music than with the Atom processor and about 10 times more than Snapdragon,” he says.
Still, netbook makers are not likely to rush into Nvidia’s arms. Nvidia is betting the appetite for music and video will drive demand for its products but it may have underestimated the stranglehold that Intel exerts. “In the netbook market, their chances with Tegra are not great,” says McCarron. “So it is possible that we could see them emphasizing Tegra-based devices in geographies such as China that are more receptive to non x-86 architecture.”
Photo: Tegra chip/Nvidia
