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In the spring, Nvidia demonstrated its Tegra chip-based mobile phone prototype to me and pretty much anyone in the media who made a visit to its Santa, Clara, Calif., headquarters.

Nvidia made it clear that the chip platform was targeted at Windows Mobile--which an Nvidia spokesperson reiterated Monday.

Though the prototype phone (actually a development platform) is quite a bit thicker than a real "thin" phone a handset provider would bring out, the prototype runs on top of Windows Mobile, as it would presumably in a commercial device.

And what does Nvidia bring to the table? The master of faster graphics processors wants to apply its chip know-how to juice up the mobile Internet device market and the Windows Mobile interface. After a decade of pumping up PC performance, Nvidia is betting a big part of its future on boosting graphics performance in fit-in-your-pocket mobile Internet devices (MIDs).

iPhone-style devices with Nvdia's Tegra APX (or Tegra 600) incorporate most of the functionality of a PC. And Nvidia is building all of the core electronics that will run a mobile internet device, not just the graphics component. (Nvidia Mobile Device page here showing Tegra 600 series and Tegra APX.)

Tegra is different from Intel's Atom processor platform--which is offered as a processor and a separate chipset--because Nvidia integrates everything onto one piece of silicon. This makes it more akin to Intel's upcoming Moorestown processor which is due in early 2010, or Qualcomm's Snapdragon.