"In the near term, both companies should benefit by cross-selling their products to largely non-overlapping customer bases," writes Linley Gwennap with The Linley Group. "For the longer term, the acquisition gives Nvidia an opportunity to expand the market for "Tegra" by developing single-chip products that combine the application and baseband processors."

Just as tablets with dual-core processors start to hit shelves, chip makers are now shipping samples of quad-core chips that could make the devices even faster. Nevertheless, quad-core chips could be overkill as use of all cores could drain battery quickly...

Net income for the fourth quarter of 2010 was US$33.1 million as compared to net losses of US$20.6 million in the prior quarter and losses of US$23.3 million a year ago. Net profits for 2010 were US$150.9 million, compared to losses of US$92.2 million in 2009.

Texas Instruments has admitted that Nvidia beat it to market with the first dual-core processor for tablets. This is surprising statement from a company that has been in the business of building power-efficient chips based on the ARM design for close to two decades.