Apple rules the tablet market, or should we call it the iPad market, and the rest of the ARM community are struggling to get some crumbs. It comes down to three other key players Qualcomm with Snapdragon, Texas Instruments with OMAP processors and Nvidia with Tegra.
Qualcomm acquired ATI's mobile phone graphics and renamed it to Adreno, but we are hearing that Adreno is stuck with DirectX 9 and won’t evolve much further as Qualcomm just didn’t continue development and implementation of future API's. Texas Instruments uses PowerVR graphics that continue to develop towards DirectX 11 and it is quite obvious that Nvidia has a DirectX 11 core for x86 graphics and that it will make a version for its Tegra processors.
Our sources are telling us that gaming is a big thing on iPads and other ARM tablets that leads us to assume that graphics part of the ARM based chips might play a big role in the future of non-Apple tablets. Qualcomm will have to do some soul searching to try to make up for current lack of DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 mobile graphics, but they are a big player and they can probably fix it within a few generations.
