Cortex A9?
We begin this final part of our exclusive interview with Mike Rayfield - the GM of NVIDIA's mobile business unit - by exploring the roadmap for Tegra.
Rayfield reveals that he will be producing new generations of Tegra on an annual basis. He expects next year's version to offer four times the performance of the current one and the one after that to provide a further 2.5x improvement.
This led us to speculate whether NVIDIA is going to get with the times and move onto one of ARM's latest application processor designs - the Cortex A9 - which is scalable to four cores.
Rayfield reveals that he was one of the initial public licensees of Cortex A9, so we guess this could well be the case. Then again ARM 11, which is in the current Tegra, is also scalable to four cores, so maybe we'll have to wait until 2011 for Cortex A9.
We then move on to what is probably Tegra's biggest competitor right now: Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset. Rayfield damns Qualcomm with faint praise by saying "Qualcomm builds a spectacular modem", implying it shouldn't give up the day job, and says he thinks Tegra will have an advantage over Snapdragon on larger displays.
Part 1 - NVIDIA: Tegra is our future
Part 2 - NVIDIA: Intel's current mobile phone strategy won't work
