Nvidia Revealing Tegra 3 at MWC Next Month?

Nvidia's Mike Rayfield said he plans to release a new Tegra every year, leading to speculation that the third generation SoC will be revealed next month.

In a recent interview with HEXUS, Nvidia's Mike Rayfield said the he plans to launch a new version of Tegra every year. This will obviously put pressure on Qualcomm. TI and other SoC manufacturers who typically take longer to launch new generations. That said, HEXUS speculates that Nvidia may reveal the new version next month at Mobile World Congress.

"I'm going to come pretty close to my cadence of a launch every year," said Rayfield. "It will be in production around the same time as my competitors' first dual-cores will."

Nvidia officially revealed its current Tegra 2 processor last year during CES 2010, however the chip didn't really take full control of the spotlight until Tegra 2-based products hit the booths earlier this month at CES 2011. The original Tegra processor was introduced to the world back in June 2008, claiming to be the world’s first single-chip computer capable of HD and PC-like Internet experiences for small pocket-type devices.

As for the upcoming Tegra 3, Rayfield wouldn't provide hardware specifics (number of cores, manufacturing process, etc), nor would he offer a precise launch date for the third-generation processor. However, he talked up Project Denver, Nvidia's current project with ARM to produce a powerful CPU/GPU hybrid for desktops.

"As well as licensing Cortex A15, we also have an architectural license with ARM to produce an extremely high performance ARM CPU, which be combined with Nvidia GPUs for super-computing," he said, adding that the Maxwell generation of GPUs will be the first end-product using Project Denver.

"This is a far greater resource investment for us than just licensing a design," he said.

The Maxwell generation is expected to launch sometime in 2013, offering a "massive" increase in processing power over the previous Kepler generation.