Mountain House (CA) - Our colleagues over at X-bit Labs discovered a new brand recently registered by Nvidia: Tegra. Could there be a fourth product family in the works?

The brand was caught very early in the and there is very little information available about it so far – in fact, what we know for sure is that this new brand will describe “Integrated Circuits” in the Goods & Services (G & S) category. Integrated Circuits can really mean a lot of things; however, until Nvidia's lawyer team does not provide information about the brand’s expanded use, we won't know for sure what Tegra is.

Tegra looks like it will be the third brand in Nvidia’s product portfolio, following GeForce (including nForce), Quadro and Tesla. Tesla is the newest brand in the company’s lineup and was introduced as a name for the firm’s supercomputing products. Tesla, of course, goes back to Nicola Tesla, a Serbian physicist and electrical engineer, but we don’t have such clear hints with Tegra.

Tegra is a widely used company name in design, healthcare, financial, analysis and consulting industries. You can even buy Tegra toner cartridges, or 1940’s comics with Tegra, the Jungle Empress. Owners of the Acura Integra also like to call their car the “Tegra”.  So, your guess is as good as ours what it actually will be.

In this author's personal opinion, Tegra could be expansion or successor of nForce brand. Why? Well, wee have noticed that some chipsets are getting a GeForce tag instead of nForce (GeForce 8200 for AMD, CN+GeForce platform for VIA). Another idea could be that Tegra will be Nvidia’s application processor business - APX2500 is not exactly a good name for an otherwise brilliant System-on-Chip. One of our readers suggested that Tegra could hint towards the integration of audio in upcoming platforms or a product coming out of a possible merger with Creative Labs. Let the speculation begin.

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