NVIDIA's Tegra to debut by mid-2009

Embedded and generally small systems are becoming a more serious market force every day, not just as mobile phones become more powerful, but media players, netbooks, and miscellaneous stuff like the Pandora. Intel’s Atom seems to be the star of the show right now due to their clout, but VIA has an extremely competitive product, other smaller companies do as well, and now NVIDIA is ready to jump into the game as a platform provider. It runs at 700MHz or 800MHz and has an integrated GeForce core and hardware video decoder, both of which would be very useful for a handheld media player.

They demonstrated a prototype in an NVIDIA mobile a few months ago, but starting in mid-2009 the Tegra “system-on-a-chip” will probably start popping up all over the place. I’m guessing it was meant to launch earlier and with more hardware, but NVIDIA’s recent troubles may have delayed that.