Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is confident that Intel’s recently introduced Moorestown processor will pose little threat to his Tegra SoC.
“You could give an elephant a diet but it’s still an elephant,” Huang told Laptop Magazine.
“And when they think about power they think reducing from 20 watts down to 5 watts down to 4 watts down to 2 watts is really good. But you and I both know that in a mobile phone you need to be in a hundred milliwatts, two hundred milliwatts.”
According to Huang, Intel is still “ten times away” from meeting its elusive milliwatt goal.
“So that’s a big challenge for them. And meanwhile Tegra 2 is already much superior to Atom from a performance perspective.
“And so now we’re already dual-core, and then next year I assume Tegra 3 comes out, and then, you know, here we are increasing performance at a lightning rate and power is incredibly low, so I think it’s going to be tough for them.”
Huang also claimed that Tegra 2-powered Android phones will offer longer battery life than Snapdragon-based smartphones.
“The Snapdragon uses a very fast processor, a very high-frequency processor, to do most of its work. Whereas Tegra is eight processors on one chip. So we use the right processors to do the right job, and so we offload as much as possible to the GPU, instead of having the CPU do a lot of the work,” he explained.
“And meanwhile all of the other processors are completely shut off. And so that benefit of having a processor do the work of one or two is a much better architecture for mobile environments.”
