The Hindu : Front Page : Smartphones herald new PC revolution

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Sunday, Aug 31, 2008
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Front Page

Smartphones herald new PC revolution

Anand Parthasarathy

— Photo: Anand Parthasarathy

Tiny giant: NVIDIA’S Michael Rayfield with the Tegra, “the most advanced single-chip computer in the world.”

San Jose (California): It is a tiny sliver of silicon just 12 mm across. Under the hood of a mobile phone, it can perform all the functions — access the Web; download audio and video at ‘3G’ broadband speeds; turn the device into an FM radio, a voice recorder, music player or a movie player. And yes, it also makes phone calls or send text messages. It’s called Tegra.

When NVIDIA’s head of Mobile business Michael Rayfield held the Tegra chip between thumb and forefinger for me to see, on Wednesday, he introduced it as “the world’s most advanced computer-on-a-chip.” I didn’t believe him until he fished a smart phone out of his pocket, a prototype of something leading mobile phone makers will launch only next year. Connected to the Internet, the phone was running a Hollywood film trailer, in what we call 1080p format, that means full high definition video of a quality for which we in India have to wait for a couple of years, unless we picked up one of the new Bluray DVDs to get a partial feel. Now I believed him.

Harder to believe, was the claim that while doing all this, the Tegra sucked in, just 1 watt of power until they showed me a watt meter rigged to a phone later in the expo area of the NVision conference here.

“It’s a second computer revolution,” says NVIDIA’s founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. “We chose the Windows Mobile platform to test our chip, and we are working with Via (maker of low power PC chips) to complete the ecosystem for a visually exciting smart phone. We want to put 3-D graphics in the hands of a phone user.”

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