Hasta La Gadget!

Now here’s a way to excite all the tablet naysayers. Slap that ultra-efficient Tegra chipset inside a 10.1-inch touchscreen tablet, make the display a matte (yay!) Pixel Qi slice of glory and then stand back as all of geekdom rejoices. We’re still only looking at renders, but this device is all set to make waves at CES with an impressive spec sheet that also includes WiFi, Bluetooth, UMTS/HSDPA, and A-GPS on the wireless front and connectivity via USB, HDMI, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The most important thing is still that display, though, whose efficiency leads to the unnamed device boasting 48 hours of battery standby juice, also good for 8 hours of HD video playback or 16 hours of WiFi-enabled Engadget reading. Driven by a default (for now) Android UI and supposedly capable of running three simultaneous 1080p streams with little frame loss, this should be one hot piece of kit come January. For now, we have another shot after the break as well as the full data sheet.

Continue reading Notion Ink smartpad comes with Tegra, aims to be first Pixel Qi device

Notion Ink smartpad comes with Tegra, aims to be first Pixel Qi device originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I remember the day AMD announced it was going to acquire ATI. NVIDIA told me that its only competitor just threw in the towel. What a difference a few years can make.

The last time NVIDIA was this late to a major DirectX transition was seven years ago, and the company just quietly confirmed we won’t see its next-generation GPU, Fermi, until Q1 2010. If AMD’s manufacturing partner TSMC weren’t having such a terrible time making 40nm chips I’d say that AMD would be gobbling up marketshare like a fat kid. By the time NVIDIA gets its entire stack of DX11 hardware out the gate, AMD will be a quarter away from putting out newly refreshed GPUs.

Things aren’t much better on the chipset side either — for all intents and purposes, the future of NVIDIA’s chipset business in the PC space is dead. Not only has NVIDIA recently announced that it won’t be pursuing any chipsets for Intel’s Core i3, i5. or i7 processors until its various legal disputes with Intel are resolved, It doesn’t really make sense to be a third-party chipset vendor anymore. Both AMD and Intel are more than capable of doing chipsets in-house, and the only form of differentiation comes from the integrated graphics core — so why not just sell cheap discrete GPUs for OEMs to use alongside Intel chipsets instead?

Even Ion is going to be short lived. NVIDIA’s planning to mold an updated graphics chip into an updated chipset for the next-gen Atom processor, but Pine Trail brings the memory controller and graphics onto the CPU and leaves NVIDIA out in the cold once again.

Let’s see, no competitive GPUs, no future chipset business. This isn’t looking good so far — but the one thing I’ve learned from writing about these companies for the past 12 years is that the future’s never as it seems. Chances are, NVIDIA’s going to look a lot different in the future because of two things: Tesla and Tegra.

Continue reading Core Values: What’s next for NVIDIA?

Core Values: What’s next for NVIDIA? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s a sorry state of affairs when a media player like the Zune HD has more polygon-pushing power than the latest handheld videogame consoles on the market. If rumors are to be believed, Nintendo and Sony will set things straight with their next-generation portables — at least for a little while. We’ve already heard that the successor to Nintendo’s DS will have Tegra power, but the current speculation is that it’ll be a Tegra 2 chip, promising twice the power of the current iteration. On the Sony side the PSP2 is apparently shaping up to use an offspring of the IMG PowerVR graphics found on the iPhone, said to be theoretically superior to what the DS2 will be able to achieve but costing more, being more difficult to develop for, and not shipping until sometime in 2011 — potentially a year later than the DS2. In other words it’s standard operating procedure if these rumors are to be believed, but even if there aren’t any surprises in this showdown we’ll be there in the front row with popcorn to watch the bloodshed.

[Via SlashGear]

Filed under: Gaming, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Hardware battle looms for theoretical successors to Nintendo DS and Sony PSP originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The CrunchPad may be dead, but with devices like this on the docket forgive us if we’re not shedding any tears. The mystery tablet from earlier this week is the Vega from Innovative Converged Devices, or ICD. Available in 7-, 11-, and 15-inch sizes it’s a simple but beautifully svelte design, and with that Tegra processor should have plenty of muscle. The resistive nature of those screens may be a bit of a bummer for some, but naturally it’ll do everything Android does — though without a GPS sensor we’re guessing Google Navigation is out. The only questions left left now are when, how much, and who will be pumping the bits to its cellular antennae? Those are answers we hope to bring you from Vegas in two months’ time.

[Via Android France]

Filed under: Storage

ICD confirms Vega tablet, includes Android 2.0, Tegra processor, our hearts originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NVIDIA just hit us with more info on that mysterious tablet Jen-Hsun Huang was pictured with yesterday, and the truth is just as we’d assumed: it’s a Tegra prototype from an ODM called ICD that’s being “actively” shopped to carriers around the world. Sorry, folks, no Apple involvement here — although we’re sure Jen-Hsun would enthusiastically embrace that possibility.

As far as the ICD tablet goes, we’re waiting for official confirmation on specs, but we got a credible tip this morning suggesting that it’s currently running Windows CE with a resistive touchscreen, and that both Android and capacitive upgrades are in the cards, as well as multiple screen sizes. We’re also told that the goal is a March 2010 launch and that T-Mobile might be involved, but we wouldn’t take any of that to the bank until we hear for real — stay tuned.

Filed under: Handhelds, Tablet PCs

NVIDIA tablet mystery solved: an ODM Tegra prototype originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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