Nvidia Tegra: $500-750M Into a $1B Project

That works out to 50 to 75 percent done!

Yesterday we read that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang sarcastically implied that there was no x86 CPU development going on at his company. Instead, he said that Nvidia will concentrate on making the best GPUs for computers and specialized chipsets for mobile devices.

Tegra is one such specialized product currently under development at Nvidia. Unlike the next GeForce GPU or nForce chipset, Tegra is a full system-on-a-chip made for smartphones, PMPs, MIDs, and as we’ve seen from Computex, netbooks.

According to Nvidia, it costs around $1 billion to bring a new chip to market. Comments made by Huang to the New York Times place Nvidia about $500 million to $750 million into its Tegra project.

Surprisingly, not everyone is a believer in Tegra being a key piece of Nvidia’s future.

“Every time there is a difficult quarter, someone wants to blow it up,” Huang said. “But in order to do something great in the future, you have to take risks today.”

Seeing as how Tegra isn’t fully complete yet, there hasn’t been much talk of design wins. We saw Tegra-powered netbooks at Computex, but where Tegra will really ‘wow’ us is when it packs a big punch in a smaller package. Hopefully we’ll see more soon.