LG Goes With Nvidia Chip in New Smartphones

LG Electronics on Thursday confirmed that it would be using a dual-core processor manufacturered by Nvidia for its line of Optimus smartphones later this year. That’s a coup for Nvidia, which has been pushing to enter the smartphone market with its Tegra chip and expand beyond its traditional business of providing graphics chips for PCs.

So far, the most notable phone to use Tegra was Microsoft’s failed Kin youth-centric device. But LG committing to Nvidia gives the graphics-chip maker something to potentially boast about. Much of the awareness of the faster generation of 1-gigahertz processors for smartphones have focused on Qualcomm Inc.’s Snapdragon processor, found in HTC’s Incredible and Evo, or Samsung Electronics’s Hummingbird chip, found in its own line of Galaxy S phones.

Nvidia, however, isn’t the only company packing a dual-core chip. Qualcomm has also talked about a dual-core Snapdragon chip.

Nvidia wasn’t immediately available for comment. The company has previously said it expects to have several smartphones, as well as hybrid netbook-smartphones called smartbooks, using its Tegra chip by the end of the year.

source