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CES 2010: NVIDIA Tegra 2 to Power Tablets in 2010

Thursday January 7, 2010 9:52 pm PST by Arnold Kim

Amongst the tablet hype at CES, NVIDIA made a major announcement on Thursday introducing their latest Tegra 2 mobile chipset. The Tegra 2 chipset incorporates 8 independent processors to handle web browsing, HD video encoding/decoding as well as mobile gaming. It also accomplishes all this with a very low power consumption. In part, this is accomplished by the use of the ARM Cortex A9 dual core processor. The ARM Cortex A9 is the same processor that has been rumored to be utilized in Apple's future tablet.

NVIDIA's Tegra 2 powered Tablets boasts the following features:

- Over 16 hours of HD video or 140 hours of music on a single charge
- Adobe Flash Player 10.1
- 10x faster than processors used in smartphones today
- Playback 1080p video

NVIDIA Chief Executive Jen-Hsuan Huang demoed a number of tablets at the event and declared that this year "is going to be the beginning of the tablet revolution".


Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeny also came on stage to demonstrate the Unreal Engine 3 running on the new Tegra 2 chipset. Sweeny states that the Tegra 2 has the same 3D power as current generation high end consoles.

Apple is widely expected to announce a tablet computer later this month. It remains conceivable that Apple could choose to adopt the NVIDIA Tegra 2 for their tablet. While Apple has been speculated to be working on their own version of the Dual-Core ARM Cortex A9 processor utilizing P.A. Semi's expertise, it seems unlikely they would be able to achieve the same 3D performance independent of NVIDIA.

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