Nvidia wins crucial slot in Zune HD
Published: 17 August, 2009
READ MORE: nVidia | Microsoft | Applications | Handset
Microsoft duly launched the third iteration of its portable media player, Zune, last week. It is also expected to broaden its position in the complex content chain by getting a full apps platform, complementing the existing Zune Marketplace store as Apple has iTunes and App Store. "The Zune experience is growing beyond a music player in the United States," Chris Stephenson, a senior executive at Microsoft, said in May.
The company that gained most immediately from the launch of Zune HD was graphics specialist Nvidia, which has spent the past year trying to break into the mobile apps processor market, taking on Texas Instruments' mighty OMAP. Although it has won a number of deals with ODMs, which often filter through to branded devices in the ensuing year, it needed the credibility boost of a big name deal, which Microsoft has brought.
Putting its Tegra system-on-chip into Zune HD may well be its mobile breakthrough. The Zune HD is going all-out to dent the lead of the iPod, sporting built-in HD radio and 720p HD video, Wi-Fi and a bright OLED touchscreen. It will ship in the US on September 15, though plans for other markets have not been revealed. It is also aggressive on price, costing $219.99 for a 16Gb version and $289.99 for the 32Gb model, undercutting the iPod Touch players, at $299 and $399 respectively.
The new Zune is the first branded customer for Nvidia's Tegra, and general manager Mike Rayfield, who heads the chipmaker's assault on products from netbooks to phones to media players, is understandably enthusiastic. "Apple probably builds a pretty good SoC, but in terms of what they have already enabled [on the iPod Touch], I don't believe it has nearly the graphics and power management that Tegra does," he told Computerworld, a claim backed up by analysts at ABI Research (although they think Nvidia needs to upgrade its ARM A11 core processors to new ARM Cortex A9s, a move Rayfield suggests will come in the next release of Tegra, billed to be four times faster at the same power levels).
This reflects a hugely ambitious upgrade cycle - Nvidia plans to update Tegra every year, rather than the average three-year cycle of most SoC rivals, which could give it the critical edge, or prove disastrously over-aggressive, leading to bugs.
Rayfield says about 50 devices, including smartbooks, in-car computers and Tivo-like video units, are being designed around Tegra. Most run Windows CE at present but Nvidia also supports Android and Chrome, other Linux systems and Windows Mobile. But it will be the high profile of Zune that may catch the eye of other tier one customers, a trick Texas Instruments has been trying to pull for its better established app processor range, OMAP, since this was adopted in the much-hyped Palm Pre and the forthcoming Motorola Sholes. OMAP will be the most vulnerable to any major success for Tegra, since TI is so strong in mobile apps processors and increasingly dependent on them to keep phonemakers on-board, since it quit the merchant baseband sector.
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