Nvidia touts thirty Tegra 3 smartphone designs for 2012, faster LTE with Icera i500 and next-gen ‘Grey’ processor
Nvidia says its Tegra 3 system-on-chip is doing exceptionally well: the company claims 30 smartphones are slated to sport the quad-core silicon this year, double the 15 design wins that Tegra 2 had in 2011.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nvidia's design-win pitch caps a run that started with the January 2011 slide teasing Tegra 3's 1.5GHz quad-core silicon, followed by OEM interest such as ASUS planning a quad-core Tegra 3 tablet. The company's claim of thirty 2012 smartphone designs — double the fifteen Tegra 2 won in 2011 — is the first concrete evidence the part is landing beyond tablets.
The wider significance sits in the modem: pairing Tegra 3 with the Icera i500 lets Nvidia sell an LTE-capable platform rather than an application processor alone, directly at the segment where Qualcomm's integrated modems have set the terms. Eight outlets including VentureBeat, PC World and Engadget carried the same-day announcement, indicating how closely the handset-silicon race was watched.
First-order effects
- OEMs designing 2012 flagships gain a credible non-Qualcomm path to quad-core-plus-LTE, since the Icera i500 removes the need to pair Tegra 3 with a third-party modem.
- Qualcomm faces direct competition on integrated LTE for the first time at scale, with thirty committed designs giving Nvidia leverage in negotiations over placement.
Second-order effects
- Rival application-processor vendors — Qualcomm's Snapdragon line, Texas Instruments' OMAP, Samsung's Exynos — face pressure to match both the core-count messaging and the bundled-modem pricing structure.
- Baseband suppliers selling discrete modems see their addressable socket count shrink as SoC vendors fold connectivity into the main chip.
Third-order effects
- If design-win counts become the public scoreboard, smartphone silicon consolidates around vertically integrated platforms where CPU, GPU and modem ship as one SKU — and Nvidia's 'Grey' roadmap suggests the company intends to keep cadence pressure on annually.
- Tablet-first silicon vendors that cannot add cellular connectivity risk being locked out of the volume smartphone market, reshaping who can fund future process nodes.
The trend: Mobile application processors are converging into integrated CPU-GPU-modem platforms, with core counts and design wins replacing raw clock speed as the competitive currency.