NVIDIA Inside of Nintendo’s Next-Gen Handheld?

There have been a lot of doubters around NVIDIA’s Tegra architecture, and some of it might be for good reason. Last summer when the technology was first exposed, we were promised some huge things, and no current or upcoming Tegra device looks to live up to that initial hype. Things started to look up for the company when Microsoft jumped on board and decided to implement Tegra into its Zune HD device. Any way you look at it, that’s a nice win.

According to tech rumor site Bright Side of News*, NVIDIA has another design win that’s arguably far more impressive than the Zune HD. The site’s confidential source states that Tegra will be found inside of Nintendo’s next-generation handheld console, the follow-up to the Nintendo DS. If this proves true, then its just the boost NVIDIA needs to start proving to the industry that it’s supposed death is highly exaggerated.

When the Nintendo DS was first launched in the fall of 2004, I’m not sure who could have predicted just how well it would sell five years later. Since its launch, it has sold close to 110 million units. If Nintendo’s follow-up proves just as successful, that’s huge success for NVIDIA as well, and it might very well help bolster sales with other leading mobile vendors who might opt for Tegra.

What might be most interesting about the next-gen DS is that with Tegra, Nintendo might begin to take graphics a little more seriously. Though, it’s hard to predict such a thing when the release date is truly unknown. The original DS had a fun library, but compared to Sony’s PSP, its graphics were lackluster in all regards. Is Nintendo finally planning to compete with Sony where graphics are concerned? Hopefully. I’m all for fun gameplay over fancy graphics, but having both is rarely a bad thing.

The question of power consumption and performance is quite an interesting one. With Gen2 Tegra offering quite a graphics punch;GeForce 9 based hardware [CUDA-enabled design] should offer immense experience on small screens – we see no reason why you could not have 4x Anti-Aliasing and 8x Anisotropic filtering on a dual-screen system. If Nintendo picked the current gen hardware, i.e. Tegra 600 or APX 2600- it will be getting 65nm chips.