Graphics processor specialist Nvidia has worked with Intel in the past, but is now taking on the giant head-on with a mobile internet device ‘computer on a chip’, targeted at Intel’s Atom. Nvidia’s family of processors is called Tegra, and the smallest version, the 650 series, consumes less than one watt of power, and measures 144 millimeters square. The smaller company has been seeking to broaden its reach out of its graphics niche and harness that expertise to gain a foothold in the market for applications processors, used in high end smartphones. However, while devices like the iPhone have raised hopes that these processors will gain greatly in volume, many analysts expect there to be at least a temporary dip in enthusiasm for the products, which may toughen Nvidia’s challenge, especially if it also attracts the wrath of Intel.
Tegra incorporates an 800MHz ARM 11 processor, an Nvidia GeForce graphics processing unit, an image processor and a high definition video processor. It can also support hard disk drives, mouse and other peripherals. Michael Rayfield, the general manager of Nvidia’s mobile business, said that he expected Tegra to enable MIDs (Mobile Internet Device) which costs between $200 and $250, with the first devices appearing by the end of this year, only months after the initial Atom-based products. Intel CEO Paul Otellini said last week that he expected the market for the Atom family – including the imminent Diamondville version for low cost notebooks, and the mobile iteration Pineview, scheduled for 2009 ‘ to be worth $40 billion in 2-3 years’ time.
The main obstacle in the path of those sales targets will be competition from other architectures with a cellphone pedigree ‘ such as those from Qualcomm and Nokia/TI/STMicro ‘ which will also aim to set the pace for mobile internet products (though we still cannot rule out an eventual d’tente between Intel and Nokia to ensure they dominate this sector. The giants already collaborate on Nokia’s planned WiMAX/Linux internet tablets.) However, even in its own heartland, Intel will face competition from ARM-based devices like Nvidia’s.
Nvidia expects its OEMs to target the midrange market for smartphone/PC hybrids, and to come up with products with displays of between four and 12 inches, using small keypads and/or touchscreens, and featuring a broadband wireless connection with Wi-Fi, WiMAX and/or 3G. Rayfield is looking to the enterprise user base first, and Tegra will support Microsoft Windows CE as well as mobile operating systems such as Windows Mobile and Linux. Eventually, Nvidia is planning a Tegra iteration running at less than 100 milliwatts. The current platform should provide 130 hours of audio playback and 30 hours of high definition video playback, and Rayfield is promising devices with better graphics,video and user interface than the current iPhone, which in the public (and Wall Street) mind has set the benchmark for mobile internet products, despite being outperformed by many alternatives from LG and others.
Nvidia initially showed its hand in the smartphone market at the Mobile World Congress in February, saying it believed the mobile application processor sector would be worth $6 billion by 2012. There, it unveiled its first bid to broaden its revenue streams, the APX 2500 apps processor, geared to 3D user interfaces and high definition video, with an ecosystem of partners and a touchscreen reference platform. This appeared to go head-to-head with Texas Instruments’ OMAP 3 architecture. It claims its ultralow power GeForce core, which can handle both OpenGL ES 2.0 and Microsoft Direct3D standards for 3D graphics, has the lowest power of any 3D hardware available.
At the Barcelona event, Rayfield said he believed the future of Nvidia’s mobile business depended on single processors to run smartphones with sophisticated graphics, and revealed that he had gambled on ending development of graphics chips for mass market cellphones. “I think there’s been a dramatic shift in what’s needed in the market,” he said.
He told news agency Reuters that he was ‘the happiest man in the world that wasn’t in the iPhone’, because of the impact the Apple handset was having in stimulating the overall market for devices that are strong on 3D graphics and video. However, other observers believe Nvidia’s all-out bet on the high end smartphone could prove hasty, with the mobile internet device market still immature and with some analysts predicting a downturn in the use of dedicated apps processors in smartphones. One of these is Portelligent, which said in a report last week that the short term market for mobile apps processors and media accelerators was on the decline, and that the use of a secondary processor in smartphones could fall to just 20% of new designs by 2010. In 2005, up to 80% of cameraphones and smartphones used a secondary processor alongside the baseband.
“Right now, there’s not a feature hanging out there that will drive a new wave of applications processors,” report author Jeff Brown told EETimes. Between 2003 and 2007 cameraphones saw dramatically increased use of mobile graphics and imaging, with average resolution rising from VGA to 2megapixels. But in 2007-2011, Brown thinks the average resolution will increase to just 2.5megapixels, a processing load that the new generation of cellular baseband chips can handle without extra help. Additionally, he predicts that phones with 5-10megapixels resolution will remain a niche, as the cost/benefit of the additional quality is not perceived by most users, and that mobile TV phones will also be slow to go mainstream.
The main hope for secondary mobile processors, of course, rests with mobile internet devices, especially when driven by faster LTE or WiMAX connections. Apple, as Rayfield pointed out, gave new profile to apps processors by using one in the iPhone to drive a well differentiated graphics experience. iPhone challengers from Samsung, LG and others use a dedicated processor, but the baseband chipmakers are also making major strides in the functionality their products can support. In the vanguard of the single-chip high end smartphone is Qualcomm, whose single-chip architecture is used by one of the key iPhone copycats, the latest HTC Touch models. So far, it remains unclear how far the processing power required by LTE will increase the burden on the baseband and so drive a return to apps processors, but this market will not gain volume until 2011 or beyond. Brown, then, is pessimistic about Rayfield’s strategy for the mobile part of Nvidia, a judgement that also extends to AMD, with its purchase of graphics specialist ATI, and even baseband makers like TI that have also relied heavily on apps processors. “You need the baseband side of the equation to follow through to the integrated part of the cycle or you may be gone,” Brown said.