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CES 2011: NVIDIA Press Event

by: Dan -
More On: CES 2011
NVIDIA held their annual press event today at the Sands Expo and had quite a turnout. I would estimate that only a 1/2 of the people that showed up actually got into the event. It opened up with Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA building toward the announcement of the Tegra 2 chipset as he covered where the industry has been, and where it is headed.

The Tegra 2 Mobile Super Chip is said to be 50 times more efficient and smaller than the size of a dime. It is dual-core designed and Huang said it was designed with thought process that it would go in products that would use it as a computer first and a phone second. According to NVIDIA, Tegra 2 is the best chip for the web, game play with GeForce GPUs and is the first dual-core chip. We will get more Tegra 2 announcements throughout the 2011 CES as other companies that have phones and tablets unveil their product lineups.

The big Tegra 2 announcement was punctuated by the joint announcement with LG of the first “Super Phone”, which is the LG Optimus 2x Super Phone. It will be the first (but certainly not the last) Tegra 2 Super Phone and will support 1080p, HDMI out and has console quality gaming. It will run Android, has an 8mp camera and sports curved glass. There will be color variations. This phone has some serious gaming implications after seeing the demo of it being used (see more on that in other posts.)

Although the Tegra 2 was the main focus, the announcement at the end that NVIDIA will be expanding beyond mobile chipsets into the CPU world was the big winner. Huang talked about Project Denver, which is the code for NVIDIA’s first CPU development ARM processor targeted at high performance computers.

Huang hinted at Windows for Arm chips, but wasn’t announcing anything although he said he would be attending the Microsoft press conference later in the day. From my understanding (I was not in attendance) Microsoft did announce a Windows phone with Arm support.

Another new product that was brought up with NVIDIA partner Adobe was GPU Accelerated Flash. It basically is 5x faster than traditional flash and could markedly improve both the web experience as well as flash based gaming.

There was quite a bit more, but I will put these up in individual posts with the accompanying video.  John will be visiting with the NVIDIA folks later in the week, so expect more details from his booth tour.