Nvidia launches rival to Intel Atom

 

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By Barry Collins and Reuters

Posted on 2 Jun 2008 at 07:55

Nvidia has plunged itself into a head-on battle with Intel with the announcement of a new processor for portable devices.

The graphics chipmaker is calling the Tegra 600 and Tegra 650 processors "computers on a chip" for a new class of devices that can surf the full internet, play high-end games and display high-definition video.

Nvidia hopes the Tegra chips, which also include its previously announced APX2500 application processor, will go into a broad array of computing devices. But it's aiming first for an emerging category called mobile Internet devices (MIDs).

Intel was among the first to start bandying about the term, and its Atom family of chips is targeted at MIDs.

Mike Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia's mobile business, said MIDs have screens of four to 12 inches in diameter and may have a touchscreen or keyboard, a connection for a game controller or a wireless high-speed internet connection. "The systems now look more like dehydrated notebook computers," Rayfield claims.

But super-compact notebooks, smaller even than so-called ultra-mobile personal computers (UMPCs), have already taken off. The Asus Eee PC has been a runaway success, and Intel has said it would not be surprised to see sales of what it calls Netbook PCs such as the Eee top 50 million by 2011.

Tegra's tech specs

Tegra chips have an ARM 11 central processing unit core, a graphics processing unit, a media processor and system memory in one ultra-low power-consuming chip smaller than a dime, Rayfield claims. ARM revealed its plans to enter the low-cost laptop market to PC Pro last month, and this looks to be its first route to market.

Rayfield claims that while customers are lining up to use the chips in forthcoming products, they are not yet willing to disclose their plans. But he says he won't be surprised to see Taiwanese gadget makers let a few more details slip at the Computex trade show this week. "By the end of the week, we'll see people talking about the fact that they're designing products around this technology," Rayfield suggests. "All the initial products will come out of Taiwan; they're the fastest to market."

He claims prices for MIDs with Tegra will range from $200-$250 (£100-£125) and be on store shelves by Christmas. "If you're looking for performance and good graphics capabilities and the ability of this thing to play HD video and the like, that's pretty cool stuff," says Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood.

Nvidia's push with Tegra and Intel's own efforts with Atom foreshadow a battle between two types of chip architectures for dominance in the nascent MID market.

The Atom chip family uses its x86 architecture, while ARM's processors have their own. Intel claims ARM chips grew up out of the communications and mobile-phone markets, insisting its x86 architecture is better suited for computing applications such as gaming and web browsing. Not so, says Nvidia's Rayfield. "ARM is coming from a position of having built the best performance-per-milliwatt devices for the last 10 years or more," he adds. "I'm very comfortable that it's a battle being fought on its turf."

The launch of the Tegra is the latest installment in an increasingly bitter battle between Nvidia and Intel. Nvidia recently attacked Intel's first break into the discrete graphics market branding the chip giant's new multicore Larrabee GPU as "laughable".