NVIDIA’s chief executive officer and president Jen-Hsun Huang confirmed that the company’s quad-core processor, currently codenamed “Kal-El,” will be available in tablets by the end of this year. “We’re the only people seriously on the dance floor with Qualcomm,” Huang told Forbes in a recent interview. “We’re really the only two active players.” Earlier this year, NVIDIA said it expected to ship quad-core tablets and smartphones in 2011, but Huang suggested to Forbes that smartphones may not hit the market until 2012. Read on for more.
Huang also explained that NVIDIA’s Icera purchase will help the company enter the mainstream smartphone market. Its dual-core Tegra 2 processors are only available in high-end devices right now, and though 100 million Tegra-powered smartphones have shipped globally to date, the company sees even more potential once it attacks mid-range and low-end devices as well. “We’ll be very pleased if we can be a sizable player in the mainstream phone market,” Huang said, noting that NVIDIA’s mobile business currently generates about $2 billion annually but that, by 2015, it expects that figure to grow to $20 billion. Huang also noted that NVIDIA currently has 50% of the Android smartphone market and 70% of the Android tablet market.
