Nvidia leading the smartbook revolution?

Seeing the CES product announcements poouring in, one thing stands out clearly: a boatload of new tablets, media devices and smartbooks are based on Nvidia’s new Tegra 2 system-on-chip (SOC).

The most notable ones:

• The Boxee Box media player
• The MSI 10″ Android tablet
• The Compal Android tablet
• The ICD Ultra and Vega tablets
• Mobinnova Beam WinCE smartbook
• Notion Ink Adam Android tablet
• Audi future car navigation system
• ASUS Eee Pad tablet
• Pegatron Neo smartbook
• ViewSonic VTablet 101

The flood of Tegra2 products doesn’t come to me as a surprise since the technical capabilities of the SOC has been known for a while and is considered impressive. The chip contains 2 ARM Cortex A9 cores running at maximum 1Ghz and other cores for graphics, audio and HD video encoding/decoding.

While most of the currently popular ARM based devices contain Cortex A8 level cores, Nvidia seems to be ahead of others in the ARM ecosystem by quickly designing and implementing a dual core A9 solution.

Device designers/manufacturers seem to be appreciating Nvidia’s efforts judging by the number of devices announced for the platform.

Intel may have made a big mistake by alienating Nvidia from the Atom architecture by denying information about the hw interfaces. Although, Ion 2 has been announced, Nvidia’s focus is clearly on Tegra now and that may result in some very serious competiotion to Intel’s Atom.