NVIDIA believes Tegra can beat iPad and Atom

Outspoken NVIDIA chief Jen-Hsun Huang hinted in an interview today that a Tegra processor might power a webOS tablet. The executive called Palm's OS "fabulous" and strongly implied it was next for Tegra support after the recent addition of Android. He wouldn't commit to any official plans on the record with Laptop but said the only issue on phones like the Pre was the slow processor, which a multi-core Tegra would fix.

HP has emphasized repeatedly that webOS will be used on a tablet, but it has never said what sort of processor it would use other than the necessary ARM design. One possible tablet nicknamed the Hurricane could be ready as soon as the summer, in time to use NVIDIA's hardware.

Android phones should come out this year using the new Tegra hardware, the company founder added.

As expected, Huang was partly dismissive of the iPad, noting that it wasn't capable of Flash and couldn't show the regular web. He agreed HTML5 was part of the future but that companies like Apple couldn't simply make users "leap across a chasm." To the CEO, addressing Flash was primarily a matter of brute force graphics acceleration. He acknowledged that software-only rendering of Flash was slow but that NVIDIA's goal was to use hardware whenever possible.

"It just takes a lot of engineering," Huang said. "It is true that, us and Adobe -- and Adobe has been very open about this -- that in working with our engineers and in working with us over the last year or two, we've been able as partners to create a Flash experience that was optimized for GPUs. And because Flash is a visual media -- Flash has rendered graphics, it has video–running it on a GPU makes perfect sense. And if you just run Flash on a CPU, then it's a real hog. There's no question about it. Flash shouldn't be run a CPU."

Intel's new Atom Z600 was another non-factor as it came at mobile devices from the wrong direction. The new processor is a major reduction in power but is coming from the notebook-oriented x86 world where ARM was built for phones that consume well under a watt of energy. Dual-core Tegras are already faster, and Intel has yet to show that the reverse process of making a large processor small is effective.

"You could give an elephant a diet but it's still an elephant," he said.

By Electronista Staff