NVIDIA is inside 70% of non-iPad tablets, and they’re still improving their chips
Posted on 22. Oct, 2011 by Albert Madison in Tablets
NVIDIA President and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang holds two sample tablets powered by Tegra 3 Kal-El. Image: PC World Middle East - James Niccolai
This might not come as a surprise to a few of you, but NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang confirmed recently that his company has chips inside about 70% of non-iPad tablets.
To better understand that 70% you should know that the Android 3.x Honeycomb platform for tablets has around 3.4 million active users at the moment, and Android is the leader in the non-iPad tablet market. Also going into next year non-iPad tablets are expected to explode, especially Android, and that will lead to even more opportunities for chip makers like NVIDIA.
At this time NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 is the most popular dual-core processing chip on the market for non-iPad tablets. The lions-share of Android tablets have the Tegra 2 chip inside; tablets like the Motorola XOOM –first Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet, ever–, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 –the thinnest 10.1-inch tablet on the market–, and the Acer Iconia A100 –the most affordable Android 3.2 Honeycomb tablet on the market–.
Going ahead NVIDIA will be introducing their first quad-core processing chip with the Tegra 3 Kal-El later this year in tablets. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime has been confirmed as being one of the first Tegra 3 quad-core tablets, and it runs Android OS. The Tegra 3 is more powerful than the Tegra 2 and it’s also more power efficient than the Tegra 2. Moving into the future all of NVIDIA’s chips will have the goal of drastically increasing raw performance while also improving the power efficiency when compared to the previous generation chip. Looking past the upcoming Kal-El the NVIDIA team has a new chip in the works that’s code-named Wayne –after Bruce Wayne, the Batman–.
Sometimes when a market leader has as wide of a lead as NVIDIA has on their ARM chip competitors in the tablet space complacency can be a problem. For NVIDIA there is no time to rest and relax their competitors are hot on their heels. Competitors like Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Samsung have good ARM chips of their own, and they all realize how much potential the tablet market has for revenue through chip sales to tablet vendors.
head image – via
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One Response to “NVIDIA is inside 70% of non-iPad tablets, and they’re still improving their chips”
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tom
23. Oct, 2011
NVIDIA has good technology and the tablet and the smart phone markets are moving toward their strengths, not away from their strengths. It will be hard to stop them.