Will NVIDIA power the next Nintendo DS?

Reports hint the possibility of NVIDIA’s Tegra SoC chip powering Nintendo’s next-generation Nintendo DS.

There are some rumors floating around about Nintendo making use of NVIDIA’s Tegra SoC in its next generation Nintendo DS.

Tegra is a system-on-chip (SoC) that integrates an ARM CPU, a GeForce ULV GPU and memory controller into a single, low-power chip. Naturally the GeForce part is what most students at my school are obsessing about, and will make most of the difference over the current DS hardware.

The original source for this rumor came from a site called Bright Side of News (which doesn’t have that much of a track record,) who claimed that the new Tegra’d DS is planned for late 2010. This was then backed up by further rumors from Yahoo! Games, saying that Nintendo had shown a Tegra prototype to a select few “gamesbiz bigwigs” at the GamesCom show in August. Higher resolution screens and full backwards compatibility with older DS games were hinted. PC Perspective’s Ryan Shrout even claimed that NVIDIA insiders are also confirming this. The evidence is certainly stacking up. Nintendo itself hasn’t said anything about this matter as of yet.

If this is true, it will be quite a big jump in portable gaming power. The current DS is due for a refresh anyway and Tegra seems like a good choice for this kind of product.

Filed Under: Gaming Consoles
Tags: ds, GeForce, nintendo, Nvidia, TEgra