Nvidia Corp. confirmed early on Thursday that it had combined the core-logic and system-on-chip development teams. The move will considerably enlarge the amount of engineering resources for development of next-generation Tegra system-on-chip (SoC) solutions.

“We have merged these teams under the Tegra development team. This substantially strengthens our engineering effort for Tegra development going forward,” said Ken Brown, a spokesman for Nvidia.

The news-story claiming that Nvidia had merged its Tegra and chipset development teams in order to strengthen the former originally appeared at TechEye web-site. The report claims that the combined group of developers will be around 650 engineers, quite a high number.

Nvidia’s chipset division has been struggling for over a year now after it transpired that Nvidia cannot sell chipsets compatible with Intel’s new generation of microprocessors with integrated memory controller. Moreover, considering that both Advanced Micro Devices and Intel Corp. are working hard to integrate as much functionality as possible into their microprocessors, the market of third-party chipsets hardly has bright prospects in general. In any case, the decision to merge the teams clearly indicates that chipset development is halted at Nvidia.

By contrast, Nvidia has a lot of chances on the market of multimedia rich mobile devices, such as media players, smartphones, tablet personal computers, smartbooks and so forth. There is a clear trend towards substantial improvement of mobile devices and there are only a handful of companies that have high-performance graphics cores. That said, it is natural for Nvidia to expand its Tegra development team so to be in position to conquer the emerging market.

At present Nvidia has several Tegra flavours for smartphones as well as versions of Tegra aimed at slate-type PCs. The devices are just off-the-shelf solutions for companies, who want to get their products rich multimedia capabilities via off-the-shelf solutions and who do not want to spend time or resources onto development of their own SoCs. It remains to be seen whether the new Tegra development group will concentrate on a broad lineup of off-the-shelf SoCs, or will it focus on making custom SoCs in accordance with concrete demands from Nvidia’s customers. In fact, both scenarios will help Nvidia to expand its multimedia system-on-chip market share.

Tags: Nvidia, Tegra, Nforce, Ion