Nvidia’s Tegra chip to be in more and more Mobile devices…
By Ben Robinson on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 5:45 AM PST In HD, Hardware
Tegra in an HTC? Quite possible...
PCworld.com is carrying an interesting story, reporting on the fact that Nvidia’s Tegra range of chips will be finding their way to lots of mobile devices soon.
Now we’ve talked about the Tegra before (here and here), but the thing that brings this new story up-to-date is that the Zune HD (Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s digi-music player) will be sporting the chip – in fact the one in the Zune will be an APX 2600, which tech-mumbo-jumbo aside, simply means it has the processor grunt to play 720p HD video.
Apparently we are going to see more devices, all in the portability area, finding their way in to the market this year, including smartbooks, MIDs, and smartphones. Some of these will be powered by the higher-end Tegra chips, running at 7-800MHz. However next year’s chip could be running at 4x the performance, so imagine what we’ll see then (hopefully something in a mobile form-factor that does 1080p HD – just a thought!).
Interestingly, by popping 720p in the Zune HD, it means that it outperforms that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iPhone/iPod touch, which cap out on VGA resolution video. Rocking the HD on a 3.3 inch OLED doesn’t hurt either, and putting HD on the video output will turn it in to some kind of pseudo-Apple-TV-like competitor.
But the Tegra goodness doesn’t end there – it also enables Flash in the browser, a feat only previously accomplished by the HTC Hero, in terms of the mobile side of things.
From my perspective, it’s great to hear about technical capabilities, but I wonder about two other things – first, the user experience, and second the available content. I guess before the end of the year, we should have a stack of Tegra-powered devices to make our judgements on…
[Via: PCworld.com]
