Wednesday 11 January 2012

The NVIDIA Blog

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NVIDIA Day One CES Recap – Our News in a Nutshell

Posted: 10 Jan 2012 07:47 PM PST

At the NVIDIA CES Booth

Amid the turmoil at CES, it's sometimes hard to sort out what's new. In fact, it's sometimes difficult just to navigate from one convention hall to another.

To help make things easier, we took a moment to recap all the NVIDIA announcements in this video with the Tegra team's Matt Wuebbling.

Here's a snapshot of our news thus far:

  • New $249 Asus tablet, equipped with a quad-core Tegra 3 mobile processor running Android's Ice Cream Sandwich operating system.
  • Asus's Transformer Prime tablet, with Tegra 3, is available immediately with Ice Cream Sandwich. Earlier versions can be updated over the air.
  • Tegra 3, by using the Splashtop app, can remotely connect to a GeForce GTX-based gaming PC and play the world's most sophisticated titles like Skyrim.
  • The Tegra 3 processor sports three innovations:
    • A fifth ninja core, which draws very little power and is able to run background and ordinary tasks with little impact on battery life
    • PRISM, a power-saving backlight technology that can cut backlight power consumption by up to 40 percent by modulating the backlight per pixel, frame and scene.
    • DirectTouch, which offloads much of the touch panel's processing to just one of the CPU cores, enabling 6x faster touch processing, lower costs and lower power consumption.
  • Tegra 3 is now powering some of the world's best cars, including three being shown at CES by NVIDIA: the Tesla 3 sedan, the Audi A7 and the new Lamborghini Aventador.

Where Are Tablets Going? Industry Leaders Weigh In at CES

Posted: 10 Jan 2012 06:09 PM PST

rayfield-panel

With tablet sales reshaping the computer landscape, several prominent industry leaders today discussed where the devices are going in a high-powered discussion at CES.

The panelists included Ryan Bidan, Samsung's director of product marketing; Brian Higgins, Verizon's VP of product development; Claudia Romanini, Head of Nook Apps at Barnes and Noble; and our very own Mike Rayfield, GM of NVIDIA's mobile business unit.

Moderator Mark Spoonauer, LAPTOP Magazine's chief editor, began by noting that 63 million tablets were sold last year, and that should grow to 326 million annually by 2016. That means they'll outsell PCs in the next few years.

But it's clear that one size does not fit all. Samsung and Verizon both offer a broad variety of slates starting at 5-inches, while Barnes and Noble's Nook is a leading e-readers. The panelists agreed that the Nook Color eReader and Kindle Fire, both at $199, are putting competitive pressure on pricing.

NVIDIA's Rayfield agreed that price is important, pointing out that the 7-inch ASUS tablet announced at NVIDIA's press conference yesterday will sell for just $249.

With so many different design approaches, Spoonauer challenged the panel to make predictions about where tablets are going.

Rayfield sees lots of growth ahead.

"It's important to recognize that these are all computers," he said. "As an industry, we're trying to find form factors that different people want. There will be high-end tablets and great low cost e-readers, but all of these designs are becoming more powerful. For some people, the Asus Transformer Prime can replace a notebook."

The hybrid concept – a tablet with optional keyboard or an ultralight touchscreen laptop – seems to be getting traction. Spoonauer anticipates plenty of hybrid designs in the future.

Rayfield agreed, with devices running both Android and Windows 8. He said it's clear that no one design will dominate the tablet category. Whether it's a tablet or hybrid, Windows 8 or Android, it will be thinner, lighter, and more capable than today's most powerful tablets.

"One day customers will forget how big and heavy their PC used to be, because we won't use them anymore," he said.

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