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Nvidia Joins The Ultra Mobile Computing Party

As we said they would a few weeks ago, Nvidia today showed off its line of Tegra chips designed for mobile Internet devices, becoming yet another entrant into the unproven market.

The Tegra chipsets are based on the APX2500 processor built for personal media players and navigation devices, but the Tegra target will be portable computers with screen sizes ranging from 4 to 12 inches. Pay close attention to news coming out of the Computex trade show in Taiwan this week, where more details should emerge from vendors using the Tegra chipset. Products based on Tegra will be out in time for the holiday season at the end of the year and cost about $200 to $250.

Also in the run-up to Computex, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini told to the Financial Times his firm’s Atom chips (also aiming at MIDs) will chase $40 billion in market opportunities; Taiwanese computer vendor Asustek said it expected to double sales of it’s tiny Eee PCs in 2009 over this year. Even Dell is getting into the fray with a small computer. As products emerge, I’m eager to see how the market for the devices breaks down. Right now, the market opportunity is large because it’s ill-defined, with each vendor suggesting its own specs as the defining standard.

Will MIDs be small computers with voice as Otellini seems to think; phones with faster processing and media capabilities like Qualcomm, Apple and TI seem to envision; or will they be lightweight computers like the MacBook Air, Eee PC or what I bet the Dell effort is?

Technology-News: GigaOm

TI Joins the Portable Internet Device Race

No one knows exactly how big the market for mobile Internet devices will be, but the major chip makers are betting it will be huge (it’s one of the reasons they’re making chips for mobile devices at 45 nanometers.) We’ve covered efforts by Intel, Qualcomm, and Via Technologies to get their chips into devices sized somewhere between a smartphone and a PC, but Texas Instruments wants to play, too.

TI formalized its MID effort, based on its own OMAP architecture, last month. It’s entering this market with its third generation of OMAP multimedia processors, which were designed four years ago specifically to fit into smartphones. The second-generation chips are currently in the Nokia 800 and 770; the third-generation chips that underlie the formal MID group will be in an undisclosed number of products by the end of the year.

TI’s chips will compete directly with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset and Intel’s Atom chips. Comparatively speaking, TI’s chips show a greater flexibility for the end products. The power-sipping (at 500 mW-750 mW) 800 GHz MHz processor is slower than both Qualcomm’s and Intel’s efforts and requires less power than Intel’s Atom processors, which can require up to 2.4 watts. Ramesh Iyer, a MID product strategy manager with TI, says the lower clock speed is a conscious decision to reduce the power consumption; combining several types of cores with TI software allows for a higher utilization of existing megahertz, he notes.

As products containing chips from competing vendors hit the market, my hunch is that TI’s might be the best when it comes to general purpose use and battery power, followed by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, which will also be battery-friendly and perhaps perform better than TI’s in general purpose use. Device specs for MIDs based on Intel’s Atom processor are larger, but the x86 architecture might win converts because it’s familiar and plenty of applications are designed for it. And that raises the very legit question of what role the operating system will play in how MIDs are used. I’ll get back to that in a few posts.

Technology-News: GigaOm