Nvidia ARMs Themselves for a Shot at the Desktop Market

X86 chip manufacturers should probably be a little bit worried at this point, considering that Microsoft has also decided to do a full windows port to ARM. Of course, Linux has been running beautifully on ARM for almost two decades already.

Don't be fooled, Nvidia's ARM team is not only aiming at the netbook / laptop market - they're setting their crosshairs on the desktop market as well, as indicated by their roadmap.



PS: If you are reading this, and you were present at a certain meeting with me not too long ago where we were talking about buying an ARM architecture license, then I hope you are hearing this message loud and clear. My honest opinion is that you need to act now or suffer tremendously in sales.

Will NVidia Follow Suit of AMD's Doc Disclosure?

Recently, AMD committed to releasing technical documents for their GPUs in order to assist open-source software developers to write better 2D and 3D graphics drivers. AMD actually followed through with that committment as well, and you can find the technical documentation here, if you're interested. Thanks AMD!

Although AMD will continue to release binary-x86* Linux drivers, the release of their chipset documentation (actually for R300 R500 and R600 series), is intended to improve the 'out-of-the-box' experience for PC users.

AMDs chips are entirely x86, from what I can tell, although I think i remember a rumor that they licensed some of their graphics technology to Apple for the chips that went into the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Aside from that AMD has no (publicly visible) vested interest in having graphics drivers that are architecture independent.

On the other hand, NVidia actually purchased an ARM License and produces their own Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 silicon with integrated NVidia graphics (Tegra, Tegra2), so they have both an x86 and an ARM presence now. Not only that, but NVidia continues to be the sole surviving GPU company, since AMD bought out ATI.

However, NVidia seems to be encountering production delays trying to get (Linux-based?) Tegra2 products to market. I can only assume that they aren't having silicon issues[1], so it really must be an issue getting the hardware to work well. They have opened up their Tegra2 site to Linux developers, offering a development board, source code, and binaries. However, I'm really left wondering if they could also benefit from disclosing some documentation of their graphics cores and perhaps the Tegra2 TRM, so that the next generation of NVidia-powered mobile devices would also provide an excellent 'out-of-the-box' 2D and 3D user experience.

Will NVidia follow suit with NDA-free documentation disclosure? Lets hope so... it would definitely be enough convincing to get me to buy a Tegra2-based device.

[1] as in: whoops! this graphics subsystem only processes data at 1/2 the necessary rate! .... ahem... maybe you know who I'm talking about

NVidia Prefers WinCE to Android

There have been hordes of ARM-powered netbooks that have been popping out of the woodworks of Computex this year. One of which was touting the new NVidia ARM Tegra chip.

Here's a link to an article on Slashdot which reports that NVidia is not ready to back Android as a capable platform for Netbooks.

I unfortunately say that I must agree - although its not completely Google, or the Open Handset Alliance, or Linux that is truly at fault - or NVidia for that matter.

The problem is that NVidia would need to expose yet another kernel and user-space ABI (for their latest, integrated Tegra GPU no-less), and they are not prepared to do so. Aside from that, Android performs much of the hardware acceleration (a.k.a. DSP algorithms) for graphic and audio in a completely re-done set of non-portable libraries (the last time I saw the code), rather than using a single, portable abstraction layer such as OpenGL.

My recommendation? End-users should stick with WinCE (as well as the NVidia-modified UI) that will ship with the NVidia-based netbooks - IF THEY CHOOSE TO BUY A NETBOOK THAT USES AN NVIDIA TEGRA CHIP. Certainly, there are many other, more mature ARM chip vendors that will be offering netbook platforms (e.g. Qualcomm, TI, etc).

However, for almost all other ARM cores with unencumbered ABI's and API's for hardware acceleration - by all means use Android! The Android community, which is composed of literally thousands of developers, will have an exponentially greater ramp-up on new technology and software integration speed than NVidia & MS will, as single entities. Plus, as we have seen in the past, the release cycle for Android will likely be more frequent and since it's Open Source. Furthermore, there is less likelihood that Android will fall behind and become unmaintained (which was the whole purpose of the OHA in the first place), while the NVidia & WinCE combination will likely become unsupported and outdated at some point.