Nvidia comfirms commitment to Android

IN A CONFERENCE CALL about Nvidia's first quarter financial results, the Green Goblin's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang said that his plans for a next-gen Tegra include the use of Android.

With every man and his dog seemingly wanting a smartphone, Nvidia is looking to get a slice of the market, and it sees Tegra as the way to get its foot in the door.

Tegra, its mobile web processor, will be able to run the Android 3 OS, Jen-Hsun added, and that will help it take on other, more established firms. "Although it made sense for the first-generation Androids to use available phone processors, the follow-on generations of Android are really going to go after performance," he said in the conference call, which is transcribed here. "And Iphones are out there, the Iphone 4G is coming, the Ipad is obviously a revolutionary product. The bar is pretty high for all of the mobile players."

Jen-Hsun knows where the competition will come from, but added that Tegra plus Android 3 will prove to be a winning formula. "Prior to Tegra, there are only two application processor companies out in the mobile space, right? Basically, it's Qualcomm and TI, and they both make wonderful application processors," he said.

"Our differentiation and our contribution to the space is where multimedia, high resolution, snappy graphics [are] really necessary. And the first-generation smartphones had pretty low resolution displays. And so snappy graphics and high-performance multimedia and high resolution just wasn't as much of an issue. But [now] resolution's a huge issue. And so that's our contribution and that's our differentiation and that's what people are seeking out in the market."

Responding to questions about its PC-bound heat generator, the Fermi GPU chip, Jen-Hsun, said, "We are ramping Fermi as we had talked about before, and the success of Fermi is certainly as we expected."

In the meantime, Fermi is still being scrutinised. "The amount of testing that we have to do for Fermi GPUs [is] longer than mainstream products because they're just much, much larger GPUs. The Fermi GPU, as you know, is some 3 billion transistors, and so there's a lot of testing to do in it," he added.

"Now of course we're ramping into a fresh new market and a fresh new product and there's a lot of pent-up demand, and so we just needed to keep the pressure on it and just keep cracking through it".

Yep, we reckon it won't be long 'til next winter, surely a good time to start seeing Nvidia's Fermi GPUs. µ