NVIDIA is expanding its spectrum to boost its market share. The latest move in this direction are the plans to use CUDA parallel computing architecture in all its GPUs (graphics processing units), including its Tegra system-on-a-chip for mobile devices.

CUDA is an environment developed by the company that taps the many-core parallel processing power of GPUs. But, despite of this announcement, first version of Tegra will not be shipped with CUDA technology.


CUDA was developed as a part of strategically approach to position its GPUs, traditionally strong in high-end graphics and gaming. The parallel computing processors can be used in a variety of scientific applications and commercial applications such as financial computing.Also, day before, NVIDIA announced a GPU-based Tesla Personal Supercomputer. The GPU is not an alternative to CPU, cited related sources.


As per reports, NVIDIA is working with application developers to port their software to the CUDA architecture. The ability to program in C language ensures that sophisticated users like researchers may write the programs themselves for the new supercomputer.

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.

Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini had a bounce in his step going into his shareholder briefing on Tuesday. Intel’s continued dominance over AMD and a solid earnings report has left his investors glad they placed their money in hardware rather then software. Investors on the other hand are nothing if not fickle. The conference call quickly turned into a debate over the shortage of Atom processors and weakness in Intel’s flash memory business.Put on the defensive Paul Otellini hinted that Atom isn’t the chip maker’s primary focus. "(Atom) is less than a third the performance of our Centrino (processor). You're dealing with something that most of us wouldn't use," he said. He further goes on to clarify that Atom is aimed at the emerging Netbook audience and is a way that Intel can grow without cannibalizing its other processor offerings. He continued to reassure investors that Intel has plenty of Atom chips in stock and back end improvements to testing as well as increased production of chipsets should solve the problem. Intel has been steadily increasing its production capacity of the popular CPUs since November.

Atom is the brand name for Intel’s new low wattage x86 CPUs aimed at the Netbook and small consumer electronics market. Atom (code-named Silverthorne) is designed for a 45 nm process but will be revamped in 2009 to include a die shrink to 32 nm. Clock speeds for the CPU range from 800 MHz to 1.87 GHz and can be a single, or dual core design. Contrary to popular belief, Silverthorne was not specifically designed to compete with AMD’s Geode system on a chip used in the OLPC (One Laptop per Child). Rather, they will use the Diamondville platform running on the ultra low cost Mini-ITX motherboards to bring better performance and Hyperthreading to the game. Intel won’t be releasing a “system on a chip” design until its next generation of Atom processors code named “Lincroft” are launched sometime in 2009. Currently Intel’s main competition is with Nvidia’s Tegra processors which debuted in June 2008. Tegra sports pretty impressive performance but its use of the ARM RISC architecture puts it at a clear disadvantage against the popular x86 approach used in most home PC’s today.