While Nvidia Corp.'s Tegra 2-series of system-on-chip (SoC) products for handheld devices have a number of design wins, they still have to prove that they can provide unrivalled experience abd battery lives. The developer itself seems to be very confident in its Tegra line and is currently showing off a rather aggressive roadmap - which includes SoCs with stereo-3D graphics support as well as quad-core chips.

Already in Q1 2011 the Sunnyvale, California-based designer of graphics processors and multimedia SoCs plans to start production of Tegra 2 3D system-on-chip devices, which is expected feature two ARM Cortex-A9 cores with up to 1.20GHz as well as improved graphics cores with stereoscopic 3D output support, according to a slide that resembles Nvidia's roadmap published by Bright Side of News web-site. The new SoC may mean that Nvidia has customers interested in stereo-3D graphics (S3D) in mobile devices, but at this point no companies (except Nintendo) have announced plans to integrate S3D screens into handsets.

Nvidia seems to have even more ambitious plans for 2012 - 2013: the Tegra 3 system-on-chips T30 and AP30 aimed at tablets and smartphones, respectively, are projected to feature up to four ARM Cortex-A9 cores and will be able to open Nvidia the door to consumer electronics.

The Tegra 3 T30 SoC, according to the slide, will have four Cortex-A9 cores with 13800 MIPS performance, three times faster graphics core with Blu-ray decoding support and display engine with 1920x1200 resolution support. Theoretically, such chip can easily be integrated not only tablets, but also into Blu-ray disc players with advanced functionality. The Tegra 3 AP30 is also projected to have two or four Cortex-A9 cores and support for 1366x768 display resolution.

Based on the alleged presentation of Nvidia, it can be noticed that the company intends to update its Tegra product lineup once a year or even more often in order to offer something exclusive to mobile phone designers. Considering that in consumer electronics adoption of new technologies takes a lot of time, it is logical to expect S3D-enabled smartphones and tablets towards the end of the year and quad-core mobile SoCs sometimes in the second half of 2012 in the best-case scenario.

Nvidia did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: Nvidia, Tegra, Stereo 3D