Eager for a slice of the tablet action, Nvidia is spruiking a custom-built touchscreen tablet powered by its Tegra superchip to demo to hardware companies and 3G carriers.
Nvidia sparked a squawk among Mac fanboys and Apple watchers earlier this week when company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was photographed by
Shufflegazine with a touchscreen tablet bearing a somewhat iPhone-esque design.
It was clearly a knock-up prototype lacking the fit and finish we’ve come to expect from all things Jobsian – but given the tablet’s overall shape and size, the single centrally-located button on the bottom of the panel and the fact that Nvidia already provides graphics silicon to Apple, some whip-fast speculation kicked in.
Had Nvidia’s CEO accidentally outed Apple’s much-rumoured touchscreen tablet? (And if so, how soon before Nvidia lost the Apple contract and Huang was an ex-CEO?).
The reality is less exciting but very interesting none the less. It turns out that the widescreen tablet is a concept device built by Nvidia to showcase the capabilities of its all-in-one Tegra processor.
The model snapped by Shufflegazine Magnus Nystedt was “developed to show off to various companies” Nystedt notes. The one used by Huang “was made for T-Mobile and carried their logo”,
The system-on-a-chip (SoC) design of the Tegra integrated the CPU, GPU, memory controller and IO hub into a single package.
The proto-tablet is likely built around the Tegra 650 or an as-yet-unreleased version of this chip, which sports an ARM-based 800MHz core with less than one watt thermal ceiling, and supports HD video at 1080p.