NVIDIA-Apple Clash Over Apple's ARM A4 Chip in iPad

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As we reported yesterday, ARM sees a lot of tablets coming out this year and NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 graphics platform seems to be a powerful choice for a lot of tablets. However, one big tablet, the iPad, has decided to forgo using Tegra and NVIDIA has noticed.

NVIDIA and Apple have always had good relations, with NVIDIA graphics processors being in all of the current Mac computers (with a few ATI cards being optional, but for the most part, Apple is an NVIDIA partner… for the most part). However, Apple passed on including NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 tech in the iPad.

Allegedly, according to NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, Apple’s A4 ARM team is being headed up by two former AMD/ATI members who, as you can guess, have it out for NVIDIA and have convinced Cupertino to avoid NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 tech for the iPad. Although the Tegra 2 is a SoC solution that can provide decent Flash rendering and 1080HD output, Apple instead went with building their own ARM-based processor.

Website Fudzilla sat down with Huang and asked him about the Tegra 2 and the iPad. He was never surprised that Apple was passing on the Tegra 2 platform in favor of their own chips. When they asked him if the Tegra 2 will ever make it into any future generations of the iPad, he said it wouldn’t. However, Mr. Huang does expect that most large media-focused slate tablets will use Tegra for their graphics.

The iPad is set to launch later this spring. Although very few tablets have been announced running Tegra technology, NVIDIA had a few on display at CES this year.