The iPad has already killed netbooks, and now it’s starting to do the same to laptops. Within five years, the iPad might even kill off the Mac, says NVIDIA… replacing it with ARM-based machines that can outperform even the speediest Intel processors.
That’s the word from NVIDIA head Huang Jen-Hsun, who Sunday stunned a Computex crowd by announcing his company will ship 10 million of its Tegra chips by June. The company’s new line of mobile chips (based on ARM’s processor and NVIDIA’s graphics) is expected to do even more but use less power. The Tegra 3 chips will have five times the performance and is expected to appear in tablets within a few months.
However, one name not mentioned was Intel, maker of the Atom mobile chip. The NVIDIA boss did little to comfort the chipmaker’s shaky tablet position when he remarked that the coming onslaught of tablets should not replace the “traditional notebook.”
Additionally, NVIDIA plans to offer a desktop processor (codenamed “Denver”) to coincide with Windows 8. That Microsoft software will be the first version of Windows to support either Intel or ARM.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
