NVIDIA has jumped into the mobile Internet device game with both feet, with the announcement of a $99 hardware platform centered on its ARM-based Tegra APX2600 processor. The Tegra APX2600, which is pictured to the right, pairs a mobile GeForce GPU (OpenGL ES 2.0) with an ARM11 core; this latter core isn't the latest and greatest ARM design but, when combined with NVIDIA's GPU core, it should be sufficient for most media and Internet workloads. It will definitely handle the 1080p video decoding and Web browsing that NVIDIA is pitching as its main uses.

The Tegra part could actually be squeezed into a relatively small smartphone form factor and, in the MID form factor, it can be backed by enough battery capacity to easily make good on NVIDIA's promises of "days of use" on a single charge. Ultimately, the big power draw for a Tegra-based MID will be the wireless.

The MID form factor may or may not have a future, but that may not matter to NVIDIA. By building relationships with wireless carriers and establishing a hardware presence in the ultramobile space, NVIDIA can move down into smartphones and up into netbooks, regardless of what happens with the MID. Even more importantly, the company can attack all three markets with the same software stack—I'm talking about Android, of course, and about NVIDIA's announcement that the company has worked closely with Google to bring Android to Tegra.

"NVIDIA will be working within the Open Handset Alliance to continually strengthen the ability of Android to tap into advanced mobile graphics and media acceleration to make interaction with handheld technology more intuitive and instinctive," NVIDIA said in its announcement of the collaboration.

The new Tegra chip is due out sometime in the second half of this year, and the company already has a few design wins under its belt. However, these are for Asian ODMs and markets—no high-profile design wins for Western markets have yet been announced, either in the MID space or the smartphone space.

As for NVIDIA's netbook prospects, the main thing that will keep Tegra out of netbooks is the processor core. The ARM11 core just can't compete with Atom; to play in the netbook space, NVIDIA will need to upgrade to Cortex A8, or ideally A9. A Cortex A9 SoC with a mobile GeForce GPU would be a killer part for an ARM-based netbook, but it also may not work as a $99 hardware platform (depending on the fab process and cost per chip).

ARM's Cortex A9 will rock, but will it rock 4X?

Speaking of Cortex A9 and netbooks, ARM has been talking up its forthcoming quad-core A9 at MWC. Codenamed "Sparrow," it won't be available until sometime next year. A quad-core A9 part will make for an extremely capable netbook CPU whenever Sparrow is set to take flight.

A quad-core ARM chip based on A9

Recall that the A9 core is a fully modern superpipelined, superscalar, out-of-order processor on par with Intel's Core architecture. I expect that it will compare extremely well against Intel's offerings at the core level on a performance/watt basis, but I do want to sound one note of caution about a quad-core A9's prospects: AMD has amply demonstrated that it's possible to completely blow an integrated quad-core design by messing up the cache hierarchy (in AMD's case, the L3 was too slow). My point is not to pick on AMD, but to say that the performance of integrated MPUs with four cores and more is extremely sensitive to larger system and memory hierarchy design issues. So A9 could be the greatest single-core design possible, and ARM or its licensees could still ruin the overall product.

ARM also demonstrated its first 32nm ARM chip at MWC, fabbed on IBM's high-k Common Platform process.