NVIDIA Tegra 650 Processor Announced – Ready To Battle x86 CPUs?

The TEGRA Development Platform

The TEGRA development platform is impressive as it features robust features like USB and HDMI outputs with a Micro SD card reader!

The TEGRA processor is powerful enough to power a slick looking 3D graphical user interface with a ton of widgets on it. As you can tell the pictures of the TEGRA development platform and GUI are rendered.

On a recent trip to Santa Clara we got to actually use the TEGRA development platform and we can tell you that it is very real and it works! The picture above is the real deal and it still had some glitches while we tried it out we should note that it was weeks ago and normal for any development platform. The TEGRA processor was able to playback high definition video at 720p without a stutter, which was impressive.

With features like this we can see numerous mobile devices such as smartphones and notebooks benefiting from this technology. NVIDIA and Microsoft worked together during development of the APX 2500 and TEGRA applications processors, so any devices that use Windows Mobile 5/6 for example should be able to take advantage of this new processor quickly. Just how quickly? Mike Rayfield, general manager of the Mobile Business division of NVIDIA informed us that products with TEGRA would be on store shelves by the holiday shopping season. Rayfield also stated that prices for MIDs with “Tegra” chips should range between $200 and $250. The question that remains to be answered is which solution will take off in the market place. Will TEGRA with the ARM 11 central processing unit take off or will the x86 architecture used on the Intel Atom and Via Nano bring x86 applications to MIDs? The upcoming holiday shopping season is sure to be one for the history books!