nVidia Tegra To Power Next Nintendo Handheld? News

Since the days of the GameCube Nintendo has stuck with ATi to provide the graphics processors behind many of its machines.  However that could be about to change, as a report on Bright Side of News alleges that nVidia will produce the graphics chipset for Nintendo's next handheld.

The article suggests the successor to the Nintendo DS will utilise a Tegra chipset, which has previously been employed in Microsoft's Zune HD player.  Citing inside sources, nVidia will provide a Tegra system-on-chip processor, which contains a CPU, GPU, a media processor and system memory on a low-power consuming chip.  The fact that the Tegra chipset is based on an ARM 11 processor hints that backwards compatibility with DS titles appears likely.

A second-gen Tigra is expected to appear in early 2010 offering a four-times increase in performance over the current setup.  Although if history dicates anything, we'd expect it unlikely that Nintendo would want such cutting-edge technology and would probably be tempted by a cheaper version of the current processor.

Bright Side of News alleges that Nintendo's handheld is planned for a late 2010 release.