Nvidia Corp. had to delay the commercial launch of its Tegra system-on-chip (SoC) components for mobile and low-power applications from late 2008 to spring 2009. The company did not provide many details about the reasons for delay, but claimed that they were related to the nature of the business.

“Tegra is doing really well. I’ve said that Tegra was not ready for production this year because the design win process tends to be longer. I also have said that Tegra is coming out party is really spring of next year. So, I look forward to talking to you much more about that, spring of next year,” said Marvin Burkett, chief financial officer of Nvidia, during the most recent conference call with financial analysts.

Since handheld and low-power applications have a tangibly longer lifespan compared to desktop personal computers or similar devices, it takes a quite some time before manufacturers of actual devices unveil their products based on new chips as they need to develop the design and then ensure that it is robust enough ahead of mass production start.

Nvidia originally expected to “see first products before the end of year” back in mid-2008, when Tegra was formally unveiled. However, now the company claims that Tegra-based devices will only be available in “spring” 2009, meaning that it is unclear whether it will be Q1 or Q2.

Nvidia Tegra 600-series SoCs features ARM11 central processing unit core, GeForce graphics core with programmable pixel shader and programmable vertex shader support, build-in low-power DDR memory controller, NAND flash memory controller, high-definition video processor that supports MPEG 4, H.264, VC-1/WMV9 decoding, H.264 and MPEG4 encoding and features some other capabilities. Besides, Tegra 600 and Tegra 650 support two displays, 12MPixel camera sensor, USB, Parallel ATA a variety of display outputs, including HDMI, as well as other necessary interfaces.

Tags: Nvidia, Tegra