Posted on Thursday, September 11 2014 @ 16:09 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
A filing with the US International Trade Commission (ITC) by NVIDIA reveals that the company's Tegra K1 SoC will be used by HTC's Nexus 9, which is expected to arrive later this month. Previous Google Nexus tablets were made by ASUS and Samsung. HTC's Nexus 9 is expected to feature the dual-core Tegra K1 with NVIDIA's in-house 64-bit "Denver" ARM cores.
The tablet shouldn't be a strong money-maker for HTC; Nexus devices are often sold nearly at-cost to promote early adoption of new kinds of hardware and two promote new builds of Android. But the upside is that Nexus tablets are typically hot sellers. Selling a Nexus tablet for Google is a ticket to an OEM raising its prestige in the tablet market.
By the same token, the contract is a coup for NVIDIA, who has struggled in the mobile applications processor market, amid the dominance of Qualcomm, Inc. (QCOM). NVIDIA's Tegra 3 powered the first-generation Nexus 7 and saw modest adoption in various Android tablets/smartphones, but it always trailed Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 in market penetration.
Source: DailyTech
