Powering the tablet dream with a wonder chip

When Nishant Goyal says, “This is the most amazing year for Nvidia and the era of the personal computing,”the  head of Consumer Graphics, South East Asia for Nvidia has his reasons. 2010, as predicted at the beginning of the year, has turned out to be the year of the tablet, and Nvidia’s latest version of Tegra chip — Tegra 250 — which incidentally was designed in India, will be powering many of these tablets.

After the iPad, there was news of tablet devices from other top companies and start ups alike. The tiny chip that may power a few of these tablets like the one made by Indian company Notion Ink, is Nvidia’s Tegra 250.

Adam, Notion Ink’s tablet will be available in the US this June. Its price will start at $327 and go up to $800. Adam also has a battery life of 160 hours without backlight, which is made possible by the combination of its PixelQi screen and Tegra chip.

For the uninitiated, tablet devices are not laptops without a keypad; they’re an intermediary between a laptop and a smart phone, offering the computing power of a laptop and the mobile-handiness of a smartphone. The chip that powers this device needs to be faster than that used in a smartphone and much low on power consumption than those used in desktops and laptops. This is where Tegra 250 fits in.

“Let me show you a baby,” says Goyal as he presents a small circuit board which fits in his palm. “This is a whole computer and this small square in the middle is the Tegra chip,” he adds. Tegra was first used in Zune HD, Microsoft’s music player and it was also used in Samsung M1. Not many devices have used the chip since then. But now with a second iteration of the chip, it does guarantee magic.

The chip which has eight processors and a dual-CPU is 10 times more powerful than an average smartphone and consumes 50 times lower power than a PC. It is also capable of playing videos at 1080p and can handle Flash too. At Mobile World Congress (MWC), the company even demonstrated a test model working on Windows CE, which was running Unreal Tournament 3 at a high frame rate — a throwaway from netbooks which are priced at about the same price-point as most tablets.

“The Nvidia  Tegra mobile web processor comprises eight processors dedicated to specific tasks, including a graphics processor. We have partnered with Adobe to accelerate Flash on this graphics processor, making Tegra the only mobile processor which provides users with a full desktop-like internet experience on mobile devices. At MWC we showed Adobe Air magazine reader applications and the popular Flash game Farmville running on our new Tegra development platform. Something which has never been done on an ARM-based device before,” Goyal adds.

According to Wall Street Journal, ‘Nvidia made a splash’ with the introduction of its new chip which is expected to generate a few hundred million dollars in revenue in 2010 from virtually zero last year. A limitation with regard to manufacturing capacity is the only factor that might slow them down.

According to Goyal, it takes about two to four years to develop a chip with such capabilities. “There are quite a few devices which use Tegra 250 and some of them will be available in the market by May or June this year,” he says.