NVIDIA delays Tegra 4 in favor of Tegra 4i

NVIDIA decided to delay the introduction of its Tegra 4 SoC to speed up the arrival of Tegra 4i. The latter part features an integrated LTE baseband modem, a feature the firm desperately lacks in its regular Tegra chips. NVIDIA says Tegra 4 will arrive three months later than previously anticipated, while Tegra 4i should arrive six months sooner than expected.

“Because we decided to pull in Tegra 4i by six months, as a result, we slipped out Tegra 4 by about three months, we are going to have a trough in Q2 this year,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia, during a recent conference call with financial analysts.

Nvidia second quarter of fiscal year 2014 ends on July 29, 2013. As a result, even if one of the company’s partners starts to ship a Tegra 4-based device in the final days of quarters, that will be more-or-less in line with Nvidia’s original promises in February and several weeks behind usual trajectory for a new system-on-chip ramp up. In any case, the firm will have rather powerful chip to ship for gadgets due in the holiday season, which is a positive news.

Nvidia did not really announce any timeframes for Tegra 4i-based products and even did not claim a single design win with partners. Market rumours suggested that the Tegra 4i is a product to ship early in calendar 2014, so pulling it in by several months into 2013 makes a lot of sense since the company will be able to address inexpensive smartphones with it.