NVIDIA Tegra 2 Doubles Power, Expected 2010

NVIDIA's Tegra may not have grabbed as much attention as its Ion sibling – the latter's ability to grant the humble netbook with 1080p capabilities is certainly an eye-catcher – but the compact chipset is certainly doing impressive things inside the Zune HD and is poised to capitalize on Smartbooks too, so it comes as little surprise to hear that the company is readying its successor.  The NVIDIA Tegra 2 – not yet officially named – is expected to drop in 2010, claim Fudzilla's "high ranking industry sources", with twice the computational and graphics power of the first-gen chipset.

Apparently Tegra 2 will be based on the dual-core ARM9 CPU, where the existing Tegra uses the ARM11 platform.  The company's target market is still expected to be smartphone-style devices, but they're also expecting interest from the automotive industry, PMP companies and other portable electronic manufacturers.  In fact, they're apparently aiming for Tegra to account for in excess of 50-percent of NVIDIA's revenue over the next few years.

Tegra is a SoC which bundles the processor core, memory, image processor for a high-resolution camera, output and storage controllers onto a single chipset.  Certain chips in the current range are capable of 1080p high-definition video, and it seems likely Tegra 2 will only push those capabilities further while simultaneously reducing power draw.