The nVidia CES 2010 Press Conference

This is my first full day at CES.  After walking though a bit of the Las Vegas Convention Center, I headed over to the Hilton where nVidia held a press conference to announce what is up and coming out of the GPU giant this year.

While waiting in line to register, I got a *small* hint when an nVidia rep started handing 3D glasses for the press conference.

Hello 1950’s!

nVidia CED Jen-Hsun Huang came out on stage right on time.  Over the next 1-1/2 hours, Jen-Hsun proceeded to discuss 3 products that nVidia is bringing on line this year.

• Tegra

nVidia Tegra is a system-on-a-chip series developed by nVidia for mobile devices such as smartphones, personal digital assistants and Mobile internet devices. Each Tegra is a “computer on a chip” which integrates the ARM architecture processor CPU, GPU, northbridge, southbridge and memory controller onto a single package. The series emphasizes low power consumption (long battery life) and high performance for playing video and audio.

Today, nVidia announced the next-generation Tegra SoC, the NVIDIA Tegra 2.  Jen-Hsun demonstrated this latest SoC, playing full 1080p movies from a Tegra tablet computer powered by Android 2.0.  Very impressive!

Whereas Intel has been downsizing, in effect, with the Atom; NVidia has  been upsizing while maintaining impressive battery life in the Tegra 2.

As part of the demo,Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games demonstrated a ported version of Unreal on this tablet computer.

Who needs a $500 graphics card?

The front

and back of the Tegra tablet.

And with the number of companies coming on board, this looks like a product *not* mired in vaporware land.

• Connected Cars

nVidia has teamed with German car maker, Audi, to deliver Tegra powered mapping and Internet powered media experience for the certain Audi models.

All at the tip of your finger.

Mathias Hallinger from Audi demonstrated this technology in a car mockup

Very impressive demonstration again, however, voice recognition technology needs to be implemented for user input vs. entering characters for searches.

• 3D vision

Does this catch your eye?

Some of the demo was cool, some was quite cartoonish with the 3D effects.  All of which was dampered by the use of those 1950’s style 3D glasses.  I would characterize it as an incremental improvement over those 1950’s 3D movies.

Now, if they really want to impress me, get rid of the need for those glasses.

Regardless, everyone seems to be jumping on the 3D bandwagon.  Hopefully, the consumer will speak their piece and demand realistic 3D without the extraneous equipment.

I do have to admit that the Avatar game demo was quite neat, however.  Conversion of normal pictures into 3D versions was rather interesting, but not realistic looking enough to impress me.

In a nutshell, 3D has a long ways to go.

And that was the nVidia press conference.  The products coming out of nVidia are being echoed by many companies from all 4 corners of CES.  Tablets, the connected car and 3D.