NVIDIA is looking ahead to 2013 even though 2012 isn’t here yet and a leaked roadmap shows what the company has planned for the future with its Tegra chipsets. The leaked roadmap slide shows that NVIDIA is looking at putting its chips inside Windows Phone smartphones. It’s interesting that 2013 is the year that NVIDIA pegs for supporting that platform.
The reason supporting the platform is interesting is that Samsung has been rumored to be dropping the Windows Phone operating system. I think NVIDIA is probably looking at the support Nokia has planned for Windows Phone and moving ahead. Perhaps by offering support by 2013 rather than sooner it can figure out if Windows Phone will do well and grow in popularity with Nokia making bunches of devices. The roadmap shows Windows Phone handsets using the Tegra and Icera combination chipset dubbed Grey.
WPcentral reports that the Grey chipset is rumored to be a 28mm manufacturing process chip that is as powerful as the Qualcomm chips on the market combined with a touch of NVIDIA’s GPU prowess. Looking at the slide it’s a bit confusing. It appears that the Wayne chipset is aimed at Android and Linux with Windows lumped in with the Grey chipset. It seems that NVIDIA might be eyeing more of the Windows Slate and tablet market and indicates that Windows Phone and Windows will be moving closer together as was hinted at by the report last week that Windows Phone apps would be able to run on the Windows 8 platform.
All of the early dual-core Android devices were running on Nvidia’s Tegra 2 platform, but in recent months OEMs have begun to branch out. One notable example of this is Motorola, which used Tegra 2 in phones like the Atrix and Droid X2, but is now moving to the Texas Instruments OMAP 4 platform. The just released, and much anticipated Droid Bionic was originally slated to run Tegra 2, but the retail device is all OMAP 4.
ReplyDeleteSince these chips are being used in mobile devices, battery life is a real concern, and this is a place that Nvidia has really come through for the users. Even when a device is idling, the application processor is operating to run the core functions of the device. These beefy Cortex A9 processors use a not insignificant amount of power at idle.
ReplyDeleteNvidia has opted to include on its SoC a separate ARM7 processing core to handle some of the “housekeeping” processes in the system. This is an older and much lower-power core, but it is sufficient to coordinate audio and video processing, thus saving battery life over the OMAP chips.