Shufflegazine had a picture of Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun Huang in a blog post today. In front of Huang was an interesting tablet that looks a hell of a lot like what the rumored Mac Tablet is supposed to look like. Could the Apple tablet be powered by Nvidia’s Tegra? Possibly, the tablet is rumored to be released in the middle of 2010, enough time for the Nvidia Tegra2 platform to be released. Its large enough that you don’t need to immediately worry about a corresponding wireless chip, as it would likely be attached (in a block diagram sort of way, not necessarily physically) as an add-in board.
The Tegra2 platform is rumored to be a dual core ARMv9 platform, plus a GPU core thats two to four times as fast as the current Tegra GPU core at the same power level. A 720p display could easily get great games written for the platform since it supports OpenGL ES 2.0. Apple already has the OS for these types of devices in the iPhone OS, and bumping the RAM to 512MB as well as hardware-assisted Adobe Flash support could provide a breakthrough device in a category no one has been able to tame, let alone master.
Another point that Apple and Nvidia seem to agree on is battery life – lots of it. If you watch Huang’s presentation a few months ago, he talks about the design philosophy of the Tegra is for it to consume no power. Combined with a custom-sized prismatic battery for the inside, Apple could be looking at a tablet with 10 hours of normal use and 7 hours of HD video. The problem is the display and how Apple manages to cram the battery in there. An iPhone battery is about 4Wh and can power a 3.5″ screen for 5 hours of movie watching. But extrapolating that out to a 10″ screen would require a 30Wh battery (assuming the display is the predominant driver of energy consumption). A 30Wh battery would be half the volume of the battery in the 13″ MacBook Pro, which would take up a substantial amount of volume inside a 10″ portable (35-45%), leaving a little more than half of internal area for the processors, RAM, storage, sensors, etc. However since its likely the Tegra wouldn’t need any sort of active cooling, its possible to fit all of that on a PCB about 50% larger than an iPhone.
I’ll make for an interesting 2010.
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