Look at it this way, right now Menlow is:Is Moorestown only a threat from a manufacturing standpoint or is there a technology advantage there too? I don't see one today and by the time it hits Nvidia should be on Tegra II.
- Silverthorne chip with 80mW+ idle power on 45nm.
- Poulsbo chip with high idle power: Southbridge, Memory Controller, PowerVR SGX 535(?), PowerVR VXD on 130nm.
On the other hand, Moorestown looks like this:
- Main chip with Silverthorne, Memory Controller, PowerVR SGX 545(?), PowerVR VXD on 45nm with low idle power.
- Southbridge on 130nm with low idle power.
The technological threat is pretty simple: without wanting to sound biased, which I am not in this instance, PowerVR VXD is one hell of a video decode core that already manages 1080p H.264 High Profile in ~120mW on 130nm according to Intel, presumably excluding other idle power, the memory controller and external memories. Once you move that and the memory controller to 45nm, even 1080p video decode is basically going to be free except for the external Mobile DDR memory accesses.
From a CPU & 3D POV, I know enough about their architecture to be confident NV will be very competitive with Intel and everyone else. Video Encode & ISP, who knows, but those don't matter quite as much. So the only part I'm not sure about is video decode - certainly in isolation, it doesn't seem to be competitive with VXD, but with Menlow the system architecture is bad enough that it doesn't matter. On Moorestown, it's definitely going to show up, so they'll need to improve their video decode numbers in Tegra 2 quite a bit.
It's worth pointing out their current HD video decode numbers are still really good compared to other ones in the industry. I don't know exactly how good, but I'd suspect they're better than TI's & ST's, no idea about Qualcomm which uses an ATI-made Tensilica-based core in Snapdragon for 720p. In terms of video decode in general, they seem to be nicely ahead of most IP cores, including the ARC ones used by Broadcom. So in a way, everything points at VXD being the odd man out here, not the other way around... The good news for NV, of course, is that the only public licensees for it are Intel and Apple.