Mike Rayfield, general manager of NVIDIA's mobile business unit, shot against Android and Linux in a June 17 interview with ComputerWorld. To the question how things were with Android on the Tegra platform, he responded that NVIDIA chose to work with Windows CE first because it "is a rock-solid operating system that has been shipped billions of times." Not only that, but Windows CE has a "low memory footprint and a good collection of apps."

Despite NVIDIA still working with Google to accelerate Android, Rayfield felt that Linux-based Android is optimized mainly for mobile phone displays. In his view it also uses the relatively popular Java for graphics rendering, which doesn't adapt well to netbook displays or NVIDIA graphics acceleration. "There's no hardware acceleration. It's all software," claimed Rayfield. An odd statement seeing that developing a graphics acceleration driver (in this case via Java OpenGL) is just such an assignment for a graphics chipmaker, which NVIDIA has no trouble doing for Windows CE. Rayfield, dismissively, isn't counting on a competitive Android version for smartbooks until about 2010.

Mobile flavors for netbooks such as Moblin or Ubuntu Netbook Remix are even less favored than Android in Rayfield's view. "The world soundly rejected the first netbooks that came out with Linux," he said. "Printers didn't work, and devices didn't get recognized. The whole thing was a mess."

Tegra integrates a 750-MHz ARM-11 core as CPU with NVIDIA graphics responsible for 3D and video decoding and encoding. According to NVIDIA, a Tegra smartbook can easily play 10 hours of HD videos and has no problem with 1080p resolution on computationally expensive H.264 video, where many single-core CPUs struggle over 3 GHz. What might be interesting particularly for the movie industry is Rayfield's comment about Blu-ray that, "it won't be long before consumers, rather than re-ripping Blu-ray movies to watch on different devices, will expect to be able to carry a single, HD-quality version of their videos around with them for easy sharing and viewing on large-screen TVs."

Over the next years 27 manufacturers should be producing 42 devices with Tegra, 26 of them for smartbooks or tablet PCs. NVIDIA expects Tegra to make up half of its sales "very soon," with a greatly performance-enhanced next generation due out early next year. 2011 should show a performance boost by a factor of 10. What does Intel make of that?

COMMENTS: As to rumors that Microsoft's next Zune HD generation will run on Tegra, Rayfield's response was, "Microsoft hasn't confirmed that ... so until they comment, I can't." One can only take this to substantiate the rumor, after all. Could it be one hand feeds the other, along the lines of "We'll take your chip and you sing praises to Windows CE"? If NVIDIA is jumping on the "It's Better with Windows" bandwagon, like recently Asus, things tend to become clear. NVIDIA's executive board may well be churning up strategic plans to counter threats from Intel's Larabee and AMT's ATI: NVIDIA has no CPUs to offer with their graphics chips in a favorable package for PC makers. Intel's and AMD's approaches to marrying CPU with GPU seem to be denied "greentech" NVIDIA. They certainly have no wish to end up like RealPlayer: Windows had Media, Mac OS had QuickTime, RealPlayer had no operating system. Users had to install it separately, which ended up killing the company. What a juicy situation a strong Microsoft partnership would be, especially when the software giant not only buys your chips for its Zune, but helps you grow in a lucrative smartbook market.

Even Microsoft urgently needs a partner in the smartbook sector that lauds its Windows CE. Unlike for the x86 netbook market, Microsoft can, thanks to the ARM smartbook architecture, show neither a massive software pool nor driver support for every device -- the main argument of x86 up to now for Windows. Linux, on the other hand, runs unimpaired on ARM because of its open source and portable programmed drivers and software -- and is the preferred solution in the smartbook market, if testimonials from manufacturers are any gauge.