Nvidia is announcing their intension to grow their Tegra processor product line into the mobile “Tablet” market, which Intel is calling MIDs.
Nvidia is taking a slightly different approach to one watt level systems. They plan on dividing up tasks among different hardware accelerators, rather than using a single processor like the approach Intel is advocating with Atom.
Another twist is that Nvidia is designing their systems to work exclusively with Windows Mobile. Putting these three things together, does that mean we’re going to soon be seeing Windows Mobile MIDs sprouting about. I give that a pretty high probability. I don’t see XP lasting too much longer on small devices as more and more people see how Vista trumps it on their notebooks and desktops. They’ll want to move past XP and since Vista doesn’t scale down, this leaves a huge opening for Windows Mobile. Now if Apple were to license their iPhone embedded OS, then this would all change in a flash. Can you imagine that? Of course, there’s Google Android too, but until the dust settles a bit on it I don’t see anyone making big commitments behind it in non-phone devices, even if it does make sense.