Nvidia to power Android 3 (Gingerbread?)

Posted by – May 15, 2010
Category: Nvidia, Android

In a conference call reported by theinquirer.net, Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia talks about following things:

Jen-Hsun knows where the competition will come from, but added that Tegra plus Android 3 will prove to be a winning formula. “Prior to Tegra, there are only two application processor companies out in the mobile space, right? Basically, it’s Qualcomm and TI, and they both make wonderful application processors,” he said.

“Our differentiation and our contribution to the space is where multimedia, high resolution snappy graphics [are] really necessary. And the first-generation smartphones had pretty low resolution displays. And so snappy graphics and high-performance multimedia and high resolution just wasn’t as much of an issue. But [now] resolution’s a huge issue. And so that’s our contribution and that’s our differentiation and that’s what people are seeking out in the market.”

That may mean Android 3 is being optimized for ARM Cortex A9 grade processors. Taking advantage of dual-core and quad-core high performance processing and especially of the much increased graphics and video processing features of these next generation ARM processors. Thus the optimizations of the OS code may look like this:

Android 1 = ARM9 and ARM11
Android 2 = ARM Cortex A8
Android 3 = ARM Cortex A9

Animated backgrounds, fancier 3D UIs are nice and all, but I wonder if those might be bloat. I’d rather the video processing and graphics performance stick to when users launch camcorder, video playback, animations or 3D games applications. Having the most advanced camcorder and console-quality gaming in our next pocketable devices, absolutely, why not. If the next generation web browsers can output 100% smooth Chrome browsers, possibly assisted by powerful graphics hardware acceleration, using a 720p HDMI output to a HDTV, for a full screen instant web browsing experience, full javascripts and flash support, then even better.