I can pretty much count on one hand the number of big name devices that are already shipping with NVIDIA Tegra 2 chips, but if CES 2011 was anything to go buy, the market will be flooded by Tegra 2-powered tablets and phones in the coming months. But NVIDIA isn’t stopping to relish the news. The company has already said it plans to launch a new Tegra chip this year… and another new one the year after that.
Now in an interview with Hexus, NVIDIA general manager Mike Rayfield is hinting that Tegra 3 could be announced soon. He says the chip will “be in production around the same time” as other companies are producing dual core chips based on ARM architecture. Since Qualcomm, Freescale, and Texas Instruments are all expected to begin production of dual core chips pretty soon, it seems likely that Tegra 3 will come in the next few months, and Hexus predicts a launch at the Mobile World Congress event in February.
NVIDIA isn’t spelling out what kind of features Tegra 3 chips will have, but based on Rayfields’ comments, it seems likely that it could be a triple or quad-core chip. Or maybe he’s just gloating because he expects to have a second-generation dual core chip while competitors are launching their first products in the space.
NVIDIA hopes to launch a new Tegra chip every year. But it’s worth keeping in mind that a February launch for Tegra 3 doesn’t mean we’ll start seeing Tegra 3 devices anytime soon. NVIDIA Tegra 2 was introduced well over a year ago, but it’s taken a while for manufacturers to start designing tablets and phones around the chip.
I think Nvidia needs to pull the Intel and dictate the pace of the advancements. Once the benchmarks start coming with Tegra 2, I’m sure competitors will be tucking in their tails and running for the R&D labs. Tegra pwns.
We’ll see if Nvidia action can trigger a R&D war between TI – Qualcoom – Nvidia. Such war would greatly benefit the consumers and lead to hyper speed ARM chip advancement just like the GPU war between Nvidia vs ATI in the early to mid 2000s.
Cortext-A8 took more then 5 year to come to market. Cortext-A9 took almost as long at 3.5 years. We’ll see how long Cortext-A15 take. I am hoping less then 2. But we’ll see.
Well, Nvidia is promising a new Tegra each year. So we’ll soon see the Tegra 3 and by next year the Tegra 4, etc…
So the pace does seem to be set if not already increasing.
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If Nvidia Tegra 2 is a success, then the OEM will want to have Tegra 3 in less time than before. The delay was cause the OEM don´t trusted in Nvidia’s new SoC.