June saw several technological breakthroughs this year, ranging from amazing battery life on Apple Notebooks to iPhone 3G S. While WWDC’09 caught most of the attention, Computex didn’t just go unnoticed. While it didn’t announce some glamorous spotlight-hopping products, NVidia’s demonstration of Tegra platform did mark a serious development in mobile computing.
Does 720p and 1080p video playback on your palm sounds good? How about PC grade RPGs and FPSs running @ 45 FPS on just on your hands? NVidia Tegra claims to do just these. And the best thing is that it manages to do all these consuming less than 1W of power. That makes way for amazing battery life in portable gadgets without taking a toll on performance. Inside Tegra, lie 8 independent processors each programmed to serve its own purposes.
Tegra houses Eight different processors for efficient operations
According to NVidia, each of these independent processors works only when needed and otherwise stays powered down. They are also claiming 25 days of music playback (yeah, it’s days not hours!) and 10 hours of HD video playback, quite insane for today’s mobile chips. Interestingly, the platform is not just meant to be used in PCs which is turned on when needed but rather on mobile devices which remains always on.
The Tegra chipset is not bigger than a regular Pen Drive
Tegra shows immense potential for a mobile platform combining never seen before performance and battery life together. It just needs suitable operating system that can manage tasks efficiently and offload them in proper fashion to those 8 processors. Microsoft recently confirmed that their upcoming Zune HD will be based on Tegra and even the prototype models showed a great fluency in using them. Planned to be released on Q4 of 2009, Tegra has the innate capability of blowing away the competition.
For more information on Tegra, check out the official webpage @ http://www.nvidia.com/page/handheld.html
