Nvidia boss: Tablets to outclass PCs in five years thanks to our Tegra, not Intel

Huang Jen-Hsun, Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO, predicts tablets will outperform mobile PCs five years from today, echoing a similar sentiment from UK fabless chip maker ARM Holdings. The Tegra revenue could even surpass Nvidia’s GPU business, he tells chatting with reporters at a Computex press conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The CEO dismissed Intel’s latest mobile strides by expressing pessimism about their re-newed focus on tablet and smartphone silicon. Taiwanese trade publication DigiTimes quoted Jen-Hsun as saying that “consumers do not care whether their products use x86- or ARM-based processor”, adding:

As for the impact bring by the tablet PC, Huang pointed out that PC and tablet PC each has its own unique functionality; therefore, the traditional notebook should not see any danger of being replaced. However, netbook, which does not have a full functionality as a traditional PC, is being impacted deeply by tablet PC.

Nvidia, of course, is betting big on ARM-branded processor designs (versus Intel’s desktop x86 and mobile Atom architectures) that dominate the smartphone industry and are slowly but surely becoming a norm in the tablet space. Tegra chips typically combine ARM processing cores and Nvidia’s custom graphics cores. Even the iPad’s A5 chip is custom-designed around ARM’s CPU blueprints and the graphics unit licensed from Imagination Technologies. Nvidia’s technology roadmap is pretty convincing and they’ve been working their way up the mobile chain. The company is set to become the leading silicon provider for mobile gadgets…

Asus yesterday unveiled the Eee Pad Slider, a gadget designed around Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chip.

Nvidia says it will have shipped ten million Tegra 2 chips by this June. Yesterday they stunned the Computex crowd with an impressive tech demo running on their next-generation quad-core Tegra 3 chip. Code-named Kal El, this chip will be fabbed on TSMC’s 40-nanometer process and deliver a fivefold performance jump compared to Tegra 2. “Kal El will do everything the Tegra 2 can do but at lower power”, Jen-Hsun told Computerworld. Meanwhile, two awesome clips for the upcoming Shadowgun game highlighted that the current-generation Tegra 2 platform has a lot to offer when it comes to gaming. In addition to Kal El products coming later this year, Nvidia’s roadmap includes another mobile processor code-named Wayne, due in 2012. For 2013, the company has the Logan chip in its sights. The Stark chip will debut the following year. All three will be fabbed using the 28-nanometer manufacturing process. Last but not the least, Nvidia’s project Denver will ensure the company has a desktop-class processor by the time Microsoft releases Windows 8, which will be the first Windows release ever to support both ARM- and x86-based processors.