Graphics power player nVIDIA has announced that it will soon release a new graphics chip for mobile devices. The chip is intended for use in phones, MP3 players, and portable navigation devices (PNDs), as well as increasingly popular mobile internet devices (MIDs).

The company’s mobile business general manager, Mike Rayfield expects the first batch of devices using the Tegra processors to be available for purchase by the fourth-quarter holiday season. He also expressed his firm belief that their affordable and very useful product will be welcomed on the market. Rayfield estimates a device built around his company's new chip can play 26 hours of high-definition video on a single battery charge, compared with four hours using the new Intel Atom chip, which is Tegra's closest competitor.

NVIDIA plans two Tegra 600-series chips and another Tegra APX chip. Tegra 650 revolves around a ARM11 MPCore @ 800 MHz, while Tegra 600 features a less powerful ARM11 MPCore @ 700 MHz. The 650 can decode 1080p HD video, while the 600 decodes 720p video. The price of MIDs based on NVIDIA's stuff will allegedly range between $200 and $250.

The Tegras are computers-on-a-chip, integrating an ARM core together with NVIDIA's low-power graphics solution.

Intel Atom is not Tegra's only competitor. VIA Technologies of Taiwan has recently launched its long-awaited next-generation low-power CPU line, Nano, previously codenamed Isaiah. Compared to VIA's older processors, the new Nano architecture offers two to four times the performance of the C7, depending upon the benchmark used. However, NVIDIA has an edge on graphics technology on both Intel and VIA. Tegra is also different in that it is not x86-based but rather uses the ARM architecture.