Samsung Confirms It's Working on NVIDIA Tegra Phone
A Samsung representative today confirmed that Samsung is working with NVIDIA's Tegra processor in an upcoming device. — Unfamiliar with Tegra? Imagine taking your smart phone and plugging it into your 42-inch HD TV at home and watching …
Context & Ripple Effects
NVIDIA spent early 2009 proving Tegra outside phones: at CTIA in April it showed a modified HP Mini 1000 running Tegra with its stock Intel Atom circuitry ripped out, pitching the chip as a low-power HD media engine. What was missing was a flagship handset maker willing to build on it.
Samsung's confirmation closes that gap. The company had already committed to three Android phones for 2009 after keeping its Google platform work quiet, and its BlackJack line remains the top-selling Windows Mobile franchise — so a Tegra device slots into an aggressive multi-OS hardware strategy, with LAPTOP Mag noting the chip's headline trick: piping smartphone video to a 42-inch HDTV.
First-order effects
- NVIDIA gains its first publicly confirmed smartphone design win, moving Tegra from a netbook-replacement demo into a volume handset category where it previously had no presence against established baseband-and-app-processor vendors.
- Samsung adds a fourth platform bet for 2009 — Tegra alongside its three planned Android handsets and its Windows Mobile BlackJack franchise — letting it shop for the best silicon per device rather than standardizing on one supplier.
Second-order effects
- Intel's Atom, which NVIDIA went out of its way to displace in the HP Mini demo, now faces Tegra competition inside the phone itself — pushing x86's low-power pitch toward smaller form factors it has not yet served.
- TV-out HD playback becomes a marketing battleground: if Samsung ships it first, rivals' 2009-2010 flagship specs sheets get pressed to match multimedia output, not just processor clock speeds.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile SoCs are judged increasingly on GPU and media capability — the dimension NVIDIA enters from — rather than CPU frequency alone, restructuring which chip vendors handset makers treat as strategic partners versus commodity suppliers.
The trend: Mobile processors are shifting from CPU-clock arms races to HD media and graphics capability as the buying criterion, the opening NVIDIA built Tegra to exploit.