Nvidia to target mobile devices

 

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By Darien Graham-Smith in San Jose

Posted on 26 Aug 2008 at 02:25

Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia's President and CEO, has pledged the company's full support for mobile and low-power devices.

Huang gave a confident opening keynote address at the NVISION expo in San Jose, California, afterwards taking questions from the press.

Though the shadow of Intel's Larrabee hung over the proceedings, he brushed aside questions about its potential impact on the desktop graphics market.

"You and I don't know what Larrabee is," he argued. "It hasn't shipped, so we can't really talk about it. And by the time it does ship, Nvidia's technology will be far advanced."

Moving into mobile

Despite this apparent insouciance, Huang announced that Nvidia will henceforth be increasingly concentrating on smartphones - an area where Larrabee won't be competing.

"Our strategy is to completely focus on smartphones," he declared. "We believe the mobile device will become the next personal computer. Look at the iPhone - we're seeing it happen directly in front of us."

"Smartphones will become a computer first and a phone second. In the next several years we'll realise that we've gone through a second PC revolution."

The announcement echoes Intel's recent prediction that mobile internet devices will be a huge growth market in the next few years. But while Intel is emphasising flexibility, Huang revealed that Nvidia will be targeting a single platform:

"We're completely focused on Windows Mobile," he announced. "I believe that Windows Mobile 7 is going to be really amazing. It takes an enormous effort for us to support that platform in all its permutations, but that's our strategy."

Support for the VIA Nano

Nvidia also plans to counter Intel's huge investment in its Atom platform with a commitment to VIA's Nano CPU.

"The Nano is a really terrific CPU. And you put Nano with GeForce together and everything works: Blu-Ray, DX 10, games - it's low cost, it consumes very little power, it's unbelievable!"

"We're so excited about it," he went on, "that we're going to optimise all our software for Nano and carry out compatibility testing for all Nano platforms. So any time you have a Nano platform, you can put a GeForce in it and it'll just work.".

The NVISION conference

NVISION 08 is Nvidia's first conference of its type, and is intended to establish an annual forum for the visual computing industry as a whole.

"We want to help define visual computing," Huang explained, "so that companies can say 'we're in the visual computing business' and people will understand what that means."

"That includes PC companies," he went on, "but also companies working in consumer electronics, film, photography and industrial design."

He acknowledged that some big names were conspicuous by their absence, but assured reporters that no one had been left off the invitation list.

"We'd have been delighted for Intel and AMD to be here," he insisted. "Next year, they're going to want to be part of it, and we'll be delighted for them to be."

"We can even consider a different name," he joked. "Although NVISION isn't a terrible name... at least we didn't call it the Nvidia Developer Forum!"