大象传媒

Small is beautiful and lasts longer

• Maggie Shiels
• 3 Jun 08, 17:00 GMT

The holy grail in the world of technology is achieving optimum battery power.

In the go go go lifestyles that so many people lead today, the ability for our pdas, ipods, smart phones, mobiles and notebooks or laptops to keep powering through the day is crucial. But the truth of the matter is that we are still connected to the wall socket and the battery life on all our fabulous gizmos just doesn't go the distance.

And all those little extra things we do to preserve the battery like dimming the backlight and powering down when not in use really doesn't make that much of a difference.

Well now the graphics company thinks it has the solution to all these annoying problems in the shape of a 'complete mobile computer on a chip' called the Tegra.

The official launch of the new processor took place at the show in Taiwan, but execs at the Santa Clara company gave the 大象传媒 a look at the thing in action before showing it to the world.

Michael Rayfield who is Nvidia's general manager for mobile business told me "Clearly the future is about visual computing. As screens get larger that's what we do for a living and the thing they really need is extreme battery life and none of the solutions to date have allowed that."

And he basically said the shrunk down laptop known as a notebook just doesn't cut it in providing productivity functionality along with entertainment functionality. In other words the marriage between an iPhone and the BlackBerry.

"Notebooks have done a great job of being mobile computing devices, they are highly productive and are very powerful. But they are basically a dehydrated laptop and you can't get very far from a wall outlet. They run for a couple of hours and you need to plug them in or if you run them longer you trade functionality."

To drive his point home he did a simple comparison test. The Tegra versus the Diamondville low cost mobile chip designed by

Size is all in this battle for the mobile internet devices space.

Michael pointed out some facts and figures. The Diamondville is a three chip solution which is just shy of 2000 square millimetres. Tegra is a single part at 144 square millimetres.

This is vital maintains Michael because it means the Tegra has "the flexibility to fit whatever shape device I want from an ipod to a regular media player to a tablet or mobile phone."

Next comes the real killer app. He claims playing a video on a Diamondville or Atom driven device will give you four hours of screen time versus the Tegra's 26 hours. For powerpoint or viewing files its one hour against 10 hours.

"We are 10 times smaller and last up to 10 times longer. It's a full internet experience. You can search the web, work on your powerpoint document, listen to your favourite music and watch videos" explains Michael.

"It's all about doing everything for a full day on a single charge. You've got all day power."

Next up was Stuart Bonnema, the comany's technical marketing manager with a gizmo to test the amount of power each device was using.

Doing nothing, the Diamondville was chewing through 10 watts of battery power with the backlight off. When Stuart fired up a movie, in this instance, the number of watts went up to 13.

For the Tegra, it burned one watt just sitting there and 1.3 watts playing the movie. And that was showing a 720 pixel movie compared to just standard def on the Intel chip.

Now I know this all sounds like a huge advert for the Tegra but the thing was pretty impressive in action. The picture quality on the Tegra eight inch screen compared to the notebook's four inch was a world apart. And so was the action.

On the Diamondville chip, the movie juddered as it tried to upload the code and play the action scenes. In part it semi froze and jumped frames. The Tegra try out went smoothly.

"The thing that has kept the mobile internet device between a cell phone and a notebook computer from being successful in the past is that there hasn't been a good architecture to build around it" says Michael Rayfield,

He says the company has invested a lot of money in the Tegra which was built from the ground up with the help of between 500 and 600 engineers who worked on it for exactly 365 days.

"The sky's the limit on this next computer revolution" an enthusiastic Michael told me.

He reckons devices armed with the Tegra processors will be on the market in time for Christmas with a base asking price of $199 (拢100).

And there will be a lot of competition among companies trying to dominate this space.

Intel's boss Paul Otellini agrees a lucrative market awaits valuing it at around $40 billion in a couple of years. His firm, which is the world's No 1 chipmaker is planning to update the newly launched Atom chip next year with one called Moorestown.

Also entering the fray are of Taiwan which will soon release its Nano processor aimed at the same market, as will , , and .

And all of this is great news for us the consumer. With more competition not only are we likely to end up with a high grade device, but also one that we can afford.

Let battle commence.