06/06/2008, 11:25am, EDT
Friday, June 6thNvidia aiming to help rivals beat iPhone: CEO
Nvidia's mobile technology will help rivals "leapfrog" the iPhone, according to the company's CEO. Jen-Hsun Huang made the comments in an interview, promoting the company's new low-power Tegra platform. Huang notes that the iPhone has a "great computer chip," with a high-performance graphics core, something that helps establish it as the world's first "legitimate" mobile Internet device (MID). The difficulty with this is that many of the companies that may be looking to best Apple do not have their own chip designers, and so cannot produce a phone with graphics and an interface that is on par.
Nvidia has traditionally specialized in graphics technology, most famously with its GeForce graphics chips which are used in everything from budget PCs to gaming systems. Apple itself makes a GeForce 8800 GS an option in high-end iMac configurations.
Huang says he expects Tegra to sell to "anyone who wants an alternative like the iPhone," including PC companies such as Dell. The MID concept has been heavily promoted by CPU maker Intel, which builds its own competing chips, such as the Atom. In recent months the two companies have increasingly drifted farther apart, partly due to Intel's dismissal of the concept of separate graphics processors.
Filed under: iPhone, industry, Apple
Other story tags: Dell, NVIDIA, Tegra, MID
, 
, 5
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
Top
subscribe to comments
for this article
Nokia Internet Tablet
What is this fool talking about with "first" Legitimate mobile internet Device. Stop smoking the crack. My N800 has been mobile and on the internet, before the iPhone or iTouch came into existence.
MIDs
My thoughts exactly, Sond. Still, that's what Huang said.
the distinction
Sondjata, I think the argument he was making was about the graphics capabilities of the device. I think he was using "legitimate" as an argument about its overall graphics capabilities/etc. (not that it was mobile or on the internet, as of course there are plenty of predecessors that fit that criteria...... going all the way back to the Newton and even earlier).
I think his meaning seems to be clear when he is talking about using NVidia chips to allow other manufacturers to make MIDs with more powerful graphics capabilities.
overlooked
""I recently have acquired significant shares of Yahoo and I want to make some profit, no matter how small, as soon as I can.""
He apparently sees no value in the fact that Apple also has its own OS and OS software engineers.
Graphics
Umm, the N800 and N810 have HW graphic acceleration. Some users have been playing a version of Doom on them for some time now. We have apps with transparency. We have apps with intertial scrolling and such.
So Huang is completely ignorant as to what is on the market. I'm a Mac user, but I'm not so blind as to what is out there and the Nokia Internet Tablets are "legitimate" MID's and have been for a while now.