Cortex coming
Tegra combines NVIDIA graphics with an ARM 11 processor. "Smartphones today are in evolution," said Coombs. "Nearly every smartphone today is ARM 11, but the move up to Cortex A8 will give a 3-4x jump in performance. Cortex A8 is the same performance as Atom, but the big story next year will be Cortex A9."
Coombs went on to explain that, not only does Cortex A9 offer a further performance improvement, but unlike Cortex A8 it's scalable up to four cores. ARM 11 is the generation before Cortex A8. The first product to be launch based around the A8 was Palm's Pre phone.
He also took us up to the ARM suite to show off some other partner presentations.
Of course Intel was never far from the conversation, and Coombs questioned Intel's commitment to the low power chip market. "It's not in Intel's interest to have a great user experience at low cost. But with ARM, full multimedia and great user experience at low cost is part of the package," he evangelised.
