In an article over at CNet, Mike Rayfield, general manager of NVidia’s mobile business reveals that the company will show its new Tegra platform and a MID reference design (left) this week.
Tegra comes in 600 and 600Mhz flavours and will be formerly revealed tomorrow if earlier news is correct. It will be interesting to see if this is a Cortex A8 based device with enough processing power to give the Atom Z-Series a run for it’s money.
The reference design looks like an oversize Nokia N96 to me which certainly isn’t a bad thing as it’s likely to have a bigger 4.8″ screen at Internet-friendly resolutions. You could also fit a nice big battery in there for all-day life.
One really interesting aspect of the ‘leak’ details is that the design is being built exclusively to work with Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile 7 is mentioned too. The article also hints that the MID-range extends from 4-inch minitablets (with keyboards hopefully) up to subnotebooks for NVidia. Stick that in your diagram Steve!
Update: Engadget published a few more details:
- The first Tegra systems will be handhelds or small laptops with screens ranging in size from 4-inches to 12-inches.
- Starting prices for the initial devices will range from $199 to $249
- More at Engadget
Update: Gizmodo have an image that seems to suggest that Tegra uses an ARM11 core but its not 100% clear where the image comes from.
I’ll be keeping an eye on new Nvidia Computex website over the next 24 hours. Also note that there’s a MID section on the ARM website that shows the N95 and iPhone as new products.
Update. ARM issued a press release. Tegra will use the ARM11 MPCore (up to four cores) technology.
Question is whether Ubuntu Mobile will run on top of it …
Ubuntu Mobile is designed for x86 devices so unless someone recompiles all the code (and optimises it for the nVidia chipset), I don’t think it’ll happen.
There is Ubuntu for ARM now.
This looks exciting, but not until next year. So nano will be 6months old before this even makes it to the industry. It’ll be interesting because at this point, we’ll have lots of devices to compare Tegra Vs OMAP3 Vs Menlow. 4core ARM11MP 800MHz might even perform a lot better than the 800MHz and 1.1MHz nanos and will certainly have more bang per milliwatt buck. :D