The latest reports on NVIDIA have it that the company plans to start shipping the new Tegra system-on-a-chip for mobile devices sometimes by the middle of 2009. Tegra is expected to be officially launched in the spring of next year, Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA's president and CEO, has revealed during a conference call on the company's financial results.

According to the CEO, the development of the chip is going quite well, and the company plans to introduce it in the April-June timeframe. Announced earlier this year, the new system-on-a-chip will include an ARM processor core, a GeForce graphics core, along with other components, including a high-definition video decoder.

The company's president also said that the lineup would include the Tegra 600 running at 700MHz, and the Tegra 650 running at 800MHz. In addition, the Tegra APX 2500 would also be launched. As soon as Tegra is introduced, NVIDIA will face direct competition with Intel, which has already released a series of low-power processors earlier this year.

Besides NVIDIA and Intel, Apple is also an industry player interested in this area. The company acquired PA Semi earlier this year, with plans to use it for the development of system-on-chips for its iPhone. Other companies as well have made their intentions of entering the market area known, which means that, next year, competition in the field will become fierce.NVIDIA did not do very well lately, and the introduction of Tegra is expected to be a major revenue generator for the Santa Clara based company during the upcoming year. On Thursday, the green manufacturer announced its financial results for the third quarter of the year, which came at $897.7 million, going down 20 percent compared with the sale quarter the year before. Also, the company registered a net income of $61.7 million, sharply lowered from the $235.7 million registered last year.