When Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of nVidia announced that he expects to see Tegra capturing 50% of nVidia's revenue within the next couple of years, a lot of people thought that this is a smoke screen to sway the attention from its battles against AMD and Intel.

Incredibly how it may sound, from what we are hearing nVidia is dead on achieving its course. With a very aggressive approach, the company managed to sway not just Microsoft with the Zune HD multimedia player  [based on Tegra APX 2600], but also a long-time IBM and ATI customer - Nintendo.

Launched in 2004, the Nintendo DS and its two latter redesigns [DS Lite and DSi] sold in massive 111.49 million units. With almost 40 million handheld consoles sold in United States alone, Nintendo DS owns 68.3% of worldwide market share.

As the time passed by, Nintendo started to work on the successor of its handheld console with a debut planned for late 2010 [Tokyo Game Show?]. According to our confidential sources, Nintendo is going to use Tegra System-on-Chip processor for the successor of DS/DSi handheld console. Unlike the current design, nVidia offered a single-chip proposal to Nintendo, a company famous for keeping the hardware platform absolutely simple.

Given the fact that Nintendo DS hardware is based upon 16-bit and 32-bit ARM cores, it looks like Next-Gen DS could be backwards compatible with the DS application library. According to our sources, all of the apps that came for old DS could run on a single ARM11 core, yet alone the next-gen CorTex-A9-based Tegra, leaving graphics subsystem to do "something smarter".

More here: http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/10/13/nvidia-tegra-wins-contract-for-next-gen-nintendo-ds.aspx

Oh man....

Now the next DS speculation can begin now...lol

Has a Nintendo rumour more than a month in advance, or about hardware at all, ever been true? Nintendo never leaks anything - Wii was a complete surprise in all aspects.

The Tegra hardware is mostly ARM IP. The part designed by Nvidia is the graphics core, Geforce 6 era, and it has plenty of competitors at that performance level and in the ARM SoC market from other mobile chip vendors. So far the confirmed device wins for Tegra include only the Zune HD, which is a US-only product and given previous Zune sales will not be very high volume.

Late 2010 unveiling, perhaps, but not debut. That would make the possibility of DSi-only retail stuff rather stillborn.

It would put it into 2011, though. Right in line with my predictions :)

Probably no new DS before 2011, they just launched the DSi, it's selling great, they would be stupid killing his monstrous legs.

Mr Khan, I know it´s a complete shot in the dark, but where do you see Nintendo going with their next handheld system?...keeping a touch screen/stylus is certain, I imagine..but I wonder what will truly differentiate the system from the DS...something that´ll make people want to upgrade..especially if the DS is still selling amazingly by 2011.

I doubt Nintendo will release a new handheld until the DS slows down a little bit (5th year will be peak year it looks like).

I think it'll have a GPS built in myself.. I don't know what Miyamoto has been working on lately but I just have a feeling some kind of GPS system is involved.

The DSi points in the direction they want to go. They'll focus on some pure non-gaming applications from the get-go, but more wi-fi compatible. WiFi pictochat, Web browsing, as well as maybe GPS or some of those helper apps, like the whole "order stuff from your seat at Safeco Field" thing, but integrated.

It won't be an iPhone knockoff, but it will be Nintendo's way at trying to make your handheld integral to your life. The actual gaming leap will be more evolutionary, just dealing with the requisite power increases.

Mr Khan...if you notice, the GBA was more or less a portable SNES, power wise...the DS is more like a portable N64 (though most of the games are 2D), as shown by Mario 64 DS...with the next system, do you see them approaching GameCube like graphic power?