Win CE better than Android, says Nvidia
Nvidia has confirmed it is working with Microsoft to optimize Windows CE for Tegra in so-called “smartbooks”, ARM powered netbooks.
Nvidia chose to work with Windows CE first, said Mike Rayfield, general manager for Nvidia’s mobile business unit, because it "is a rock-solid operating system that has been shipped billions of times."
Windows CE also has a "low memory footprint and a good collection of apps," Rayfield said.
Nvidia is also working with Google to accelerate Android when running on Tegra hardware. But it will be about a year before that delivers for smartbooks, due to existing limitations in Android, he said.
For instance, Android screen icons that fit on smartphone screens (usually 4-inches and under) are oversized on a smartbook’s 8- or 9-inch screen. Also, all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system’s Java code, a technique he says is too slow for HD video.
"There’s no hardware acceleration. It’s all software," Rayfield said. "Everyone’s talking about Android for cell phones, but the reality doesn’t exist for the larger displays [of a smartbook.]"
Nvidia has garnered 42 design wins from 27 different manufacturers all building devices using Tegra, said Rayfield. More than half of the wins (26) are for smartbook or tablet designs. Those can arrive to market in just six months, versus two years for smartphones designed for telecom carriers, Rayfield said.
Rayfield echoed comments by Nvidia executives during its analyst day on Tuesday that Tegra could make up more than half of Nvidia’s sales ($3.4 billion in fiscal year ending January 2009) very soon.
"It’s an aggressive statement, no doubt. But we’ve got a pretty good pipeline," Rayfield said. Also, it won’t be long before consumers, rather than re-ripping Blu-ray movies to watch on different devices, will expect to be able to carry a single, HD-quality version of their videos around with them for easy sharing and viewing on large-screen TVs.
Nvidia is also improving Tegra for use on Windows Mobile, a close variant of Windows CE, for ARM-based smartphones. Tegra bundles an ARM CPU (the 750 MHz ARM 11) with specialized chips designed by Nvidia for graphics, HD video encoding and decoding, stereo sound and more. The next generation of Tegra due early next year will boast 4 times the performance of today’s version, while the 2011 update will improve performance 10 times over today’s, he said.
Read more at Computerworld here.
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Posted in new device, news | 
Tags: android, netbooks, nvidia, nvidia tegra, smartbooks, tegra, win ce, windows ce
The best part from this article was the last part
, hope that wm7 with tegra will turn out amazing. Also, pretty nice to hear that they are working more importantly on windows than android 
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Two years for a Tegra phone? Didn’t nVidia promise one by this fall LAST winter?
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42 design wins?! Nice. More than snapdragon!
Shame that 26 of those will be smartbooks and tablets. Was hoping that we would see some MIDs this year but now I’m starting to think that nvidia waits for WM7 to use it on MID type of device(devices like OQO 2).
Shame that WM7 is still one year from now…
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NuShrike Reply:
June 18th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Ya, where are those snapdragon designs that were supposed to show up beginning of 2009? Still to few now and way behind on delivery, and still unknown if there’s going to be any OS support for it anyways at the rate WM is developing.
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Wishmaster Reply:
June 18th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
I think that lack of wm”7″ it the cause of delay.
Remember that nvidia was saying that we should see devices based on tegra around 2Q of this year and still nothing… Now they are saying holiday season.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they would delay them even more just to use wm”7″ and release them early next year…
Besides thanks to deal with nokia qualcomm can always focus on symbian if wm fails…
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Tegra is currently still sipping too much power, seems we won’t see A9 Tegra on smartphones any time soon..
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Maybe you should have considered Nvidia’s partnership with Microsoft when printing articles or claims that are clearly inaccurate.
For example
“For instance, Android screen icons that fit on smartphone screens (usually 4-inches and under) are oversized on a smartbook’s 8- or 9-inch screen.”
Funny how Asus have no such problem as you can see from the link below. Then of course I can should screen shots from Accer and even Dell who have had no such problem.
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/01/01/android-netbooks-on-their-way-likely-by-2010/
“Also, all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system’s Java code, a technique he says is too slow for HD video.”
Yet the Android developer guide clearly states there is hardware acceleration.
Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html
“On the G1 hardware acceleration is used for all window compositing and
OpenGL drawing. It is not currently used for rendering inside of a window.
We’d like to support acceleration inside of a window, but this is very
tricky to implement (requiring multiple active OpenGL contexts in multiple
processes) and not currently scheduled on the roadmap.”
-Dianne Hackborn Nov 2008
Android framework engineer
Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html
Edgelib has a native C++ library was porter to Android as early as 2007. A fully GPU accelerated 2D/3D graphics library can can be used from C++ or Java on Android.
http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/f31003bbed8bf7a9/
Maybe you should get an independent source for your information as clearly a lot of information you have been posting about Android is inaccurate.
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