Nvidia Tegra Boosts Netbook Video Capability

People are starting to accept that netbooks aren’t DVD players (with a few exceptions), but it would still be nice if netbooks didn’t struggle with YouTube or Hulu. Nvidia has heard the market’s complaints and come out with a new system-on-a-chip named Tegra, set to boost netbook video immensely.

Mike Rayfield of Nvidia’s GPU described the new Tegra chip as “basically a full motherboard on a PCB (printed circuit board) the size of a pack of gum.”

At Computex 2009, Nvidia said that Foxconn, Wistron, Pegatron and Mobinnova are all planning Tegra netbooks by the end of this year. The new chip will need to compete with Intel’s Atom, the Qualcomm Snapdragon, and the VIA Nano if it hopes to get a chunk of the 21 million netbook sales expected this year.

Tegra is basically an 800 MHz ARM CPU, an HD video processor, an imaging processor, GeForce GPU and an audio processor. Nvidia says they can be used independently or in sync, while keeping battery life long. Power efficiency is going to be a strong focus with the Tegra, so much so that Rayfield says that “with Tegra you can get 120 times longer battery life while listening to music than with the Atom processor and about 10 times more than Snapdragon.”

While comparisons may be tempting, the Tegra family is quite different from the Ion, according to Dean McCarron of Mercury Research.

“Ion is a chipset that pairs graphics capabilities with an Intel Atom CPU… Tegra takes the graphics core and combines it with a CPU that is not an x-86 class.”

Regardless of all the hype surrounding the Tegra, it’s possible that manufacturers won’t bite. “In the netbook market, their chances with Tegra are not great,” said McCarron. “So it is possible that we could see them emphasizing Tegra-based devices in geographies such as China that are more receptive to non x-86 architecture.”

Via Wired.