Nvidia: For smartbooks, Windows CE beats Android

Rayfield evinced even less enthusiasm for more mainstream flavors of Linux available on ARM, such as Canonical's Ubuntu or Intel's Moblin.

"The world soundly rejected the first netbooks that came out with Linux," he said. "Printers didn't work, and devices didn't get recognized. The whole thing was a mess."

Nvidia has garnered 42 design wins from 27 different manufacturers all building devices using Tegra, said Rayfield. More than half of the wins (26) are for smartbook or tablet designs. Those can arrive to market in just six months, versus two years for smartphones designed for telecom carriers, Rayfield said.

Rayfield echoed comments by Nvidia executives during its analyst day on Tuesday that Tegra could make up more than half of Nvidia's sales ($3.4 billion in fiscal year ending January 2009) very soon.

"It's an aggressive statement, no doubt. But we've got a pretty good pipeline," Rayfield said. Also, it won't be long before consumers, rather than re-ripping Blu-ray movies to watch on different devices, will expect to be able to carry a single, HD-quality version of their videos around with them for easy sharing and viewing on large-screen TVs.

By using its own graphical expertise in Tegra rather than licensing it, Nvidia hopes to reap gross profit margins of 45% on Tegra by charging commensurately for its better performance over competing platforms from Qualcomm (Snapdragon) and Freescale Semiconductor, Rayfield said.

The next generation of Tegra due early next year will boast 4 times the performance of today's version, while the 2011 update will improve performance 10 times over today's, he said.