Nvidia Tegra No Longer Considered To Be SoC for Phones and Tablets

Nvidia learned the hard way that the mobile telephone and tablet market is harsh, brutal and monopolized. In an interview with CNET NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang pretty much dropped a bomb when I learned that Nvidia is no longer targeting smartphones and tablets with Tegra. They are no longer focussing on that that market.

Nvidia can't seem to gain ground with their solution and as such will shift their focus with this SoC on computing and gaming. Huang explains it's not NVIDIA's goal to go after commodity or mainstream devices, they want to be in performance-oriented, visual computing-oriented, gaming-oriented devices. Here's a part of the interview:

Does that mean we're not going to see Nvidia in smartphones? You earlier said gaining share in smartphones was a matter of releasing a processor, called Tegra 4i, that integrated 4G with your apps processor. Has that not worked?

Huang: [Tegra 4i] wasn't that successful for us. I would say that when we first started this, we thought that bringing 4G to entry-level phones, mainstream phones, integrated with our apps processor would be a real opportunity. I think that the phone marketplace has commoditized really, really fast. It is not our strategy to go after commodity phones. It is not our strategy to go after mainstream devices. But our strategy is to focus on performance-oriented, visual computing-oriented, gaming-oriented devices where we can add a lot of value.

Why did Tegra struggle in smartphones?

Huang: Our focus as a company is still performance-oriented. The mainstream phone market commoditized so fast that really the...differentiators were price. And you can see the pressure that MediaTek is putting on Qualcomm, and you can see the pressure that MediaTek is putting on Marvell and Broadcom and all of these companies. Because guess what? They're the lowest-cost provider. I think that for mainstream phones, there's one strategy that really works right now, which is price. That's not our differentiator. That's not what we do for a living.

Will there be a Tegra 5i or whatever you would call a chip that integrates 4G with an apps processor?

Huang: We don't talk about future products, but I also haven't talked about T5i.

You delayed Tegra 4 for Tegra 4i. Did that turn out to be a mistake? Did you miss this whole design cycle?

Huang: I would say that Tegra 4i didn't pan out. We learned a lot in the process. But there are many things in our company that didn't pan out. That's OK. If you want to be an innovative company, you have to fail.

Look, we built a great chip. LG's shipping it in the rest of the world outside the United States. It's a fantastic processor. But from a business strategy, it wasn't a success. So I learned a lot from it. It's OK. I'm glad I did it, and now we're moving on.