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.
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I like the way Huang responded to these questions - seems very polite, honest, and to-the-point, and I like his ability to look at the bright side without seeming cocky.
While Samsung and Qualcomm were definitely problems to Nvidia's phone marketshare, I get the impression the real problem is power efficiency. The Tegra series is amazingly power efficient for what it does, but it seems like it is far more power hungry than Exynos or Snapdragon. I could be wrong since I never actually seen tests on this, but knowing what nvidia put into their chips and knowing their record of power consumption on x86 GPUs, I can't imagine tegra had the best battery life. I think the tegra series was great for tablets, but if nvidia is straying from tablets too I'm not too sure where they expect to go to make a better profit.
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Well at least they came clean and said that what they want is money. Too bad 10yrs ago nVidia was the cheaper one with some nice technologies and good performance.
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I dont think this is the question, but if they put billions of dollars to developp chips ( tegra ), and they dont sell, its not profitable for them, its better to rethink their objectives..
Embedded market is certainly going to grow up, i dont know to what level it could be or if there, i fear, there too, the most profitable chips will again be the low costs one ( not everyone buy high cost cars )...
But, there's not only cars there, AMD as example is allready equip Boeing planes with their GPU APU, for the pilots control screens and plan to equip then them with their SOC. A market where Samsung is allready a lot involved too at many level..
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I don't recall nvidia ever being the cheapest. I never checked prices at the time the Radeon 9800 Pro came out (that was 10 years ago, right?) but I remember nvidia's prices were always a little on the high side. But, aside from the Titans, I always felt nvidia had decently fair pricing. A lot of what you're paying for is their driver support. AMD/ATI often has better hardware but it takes FOREVER for their drivers to catch up. I don't make upgrades often, so that doesn't really bother me. That being said, I like both companies equally, but I tend to be more inclined to buy AMD since they need the money more.
In another light, I think nvidia tries a lot harder to advance GPU technology (which I like), but I don't like how they try to be so proprietary about it. I find nvidia to be a greedier company - they're kind of like pharmaceutical companies, where they create something for the good of everyone but they DEMAND you do things their way and pay their price, which kind of defeats the purpose of their efforts.
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Doesn't surprise me. Qualcomm was lightyears ahead when it came to radio integration which is what OEM's really want. I'm sure they come in at a lower pricepoint too for the entire package so it's really a no brainer. Hopefully Nvidia can find a niche in Cars/TV segment. Their work with Audi/Tesla is really impressive.