NVIDIA’s CEO, Jen-Hsen Huang, is one of the most wanted men in the Smartphone space today. It seems that cellphone and tablet manufacturers are all pumped up about using his firm’s Tegra 2 processor to get the ball rolling on dual-core processing.
Huang says that the big thing about putting the Tegra 2 under the hood in smartphones is that it turns the device from being a product focused on the phone, to becoming a device that is computer-centric. The executive said that he believes that in the future, “Your mobile device will be a computer first and a phone second.” He went on to add that in ten years, the smartphone will evolve into the most sophisticated computer.
Huang feels that this is all “A big deal” for the computing industry and according to him, this is coming sooner than you might think. Speaking about the impact on his company, the executive said, “Our tablet business and our phone business is going to ramp, and it’s going to ramp hard. So, we just have to build some of the best things we’ve ever built, and so I think Q1 is when all of you will see what we have been so busy working on, and I think you will be more than surprised and delighted.”
He actually said a lot more but his point was that NVIDIA is the first computer technology company to move into mobile devices and their Tegra 2 superphones and tablets will be computer-centric first instead of phone-centric.
In last week’s Q3 earnings call, Jen-Hsun continued to hint about the Tegra 2 devices coming in early Q1. “They have to be absolutely groundbreaking or why would anybody come to buy them.” He went on to admit they were late in arriving, but placed some of the blame on Google for the time it took to get Honeycomb ready. “So, I think that the extra time that was necessary to build these devices and build the operating system and all the applications and the system software necessary to do it, but they are going to be absolutely magical.”
Clearly, Jen-Hsun is really excited about the tablet revolution he thinks is coming soon. “Every single company I know is working on a tablet. I don’t remember the last time in the history of computing where a singular device is being worked on by all of the industries. This is a revolutionary form factor and I think it’s a (foregone) conclusion this is going to be probably be the largest computing segment.”
When an analyst referred to Honeycomb as an “operating system update”, Jen-Hsun replied, “To call the next generation devices an operating system update would really be an understatement I think, and it would do injustice to the amount of engineering that has gone into building the next-generation of tablets.”
“You won’t recognize it, let me just put it that way. What the team is shooting for is nothing short of a great experience and so I have every confidence in the team. We’re going to make sure we build something absolutely, absolutely magical.” he added
The CEO also noted that the Tegra line has a long future ahead. He said, “Tegra 2 is just our first entry. Tegra 3 is almost done and Tegra 4 is being built….every single year there will be a new Tegra.” It all sounds exciting and when an analyst referred to Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) as an OS update, Huang set him straight by replying, “To call the next generation devices an operating system update would really be an understatement I think, and it would do injustice to the amount of engineering that has gone into building the next-generation of tablets.”
You might like: