In what should not have been a surprise to anyone, NVIDIA launched their own tablet today. This new tablet is part of their mobile gaming initiative and is a smart move considering some of the setbacks NVIDIA has had when dealing with the mobile industry.

Nvidia Shield console is an interesting gaming system that supports all Android games, but also users can play all PC titles via streaming from the computer system, provided they are equipped with appropriate Nvidia graphic cards. These days the company announced that the operating system that runs Shield console will get the open source status, which means that anyone can use it for free, modify and adapt it in order to create their own games and programs.

nVidia is best known as the maker of heavy duty GPUs although most know about their mobile product Tegra (and the components that go into it). Between these two items nVidia has a very good product portfolio. However, nVidia has not always been limited to GPUs and SoCs. At one time they also developed and manufactured their own Chipsets. These were required to utilize SLI (Scalable Link Interface) that has its roots from 3dfx which nVidia grabbed when they bought the latter. nVidia’s chipset business did not last that long due to a number of reasons and they were eventually forced to let it drop and instead license the right to use SLI out to other companies.