Published in PC Hardware

Nvidia confirms high end tablet market is slowing

by on10 May 2013



But it’s a very large market

It was interesting to see Jen-Hsun Huang answering a question on Nvidia's last conference call about tablet market trends. The high-end tablet and phone market is slowing down in favour of low-end gear. Nvidia confirmed that they are seeing trend the same but Jensen also admitted that Nvidia isn’t the dominant player here to be affected by the trend that much. It is not that often that Nvidia admits these things and obviously it goes without saying that Qualcomm is the Mobzilla (Or LTEzilla) in this market. 

Huang sees Nvidia as a company that is now entering the high end tablet and phone market and he believes that the market is quite large and gives Nvidia a lot of opportunity. This is more or less a general, answer without revealing anything about Tegra 4 or Tegra 4i.

Jensen sees Android as a very disruptive OS in low end, mainstream and high end markets and it will continue to grow over time. He sees that people who enjoy Android phones will want to enjoy Android tablets as well. Once the content gets into to cloud Nvidia believes that people will want to use these applications across their devices from phone to tablet. There is still a lot of opportunity to grow the Android market and the Android phone share might increase over time. Nvidia obviously sees an opportunity in this market.

Last year Nvidia scored an important tablet design win, the Nexus 7 that sold millions of units, helping Tegra 3 big time, but again due to delays it failed to secure the next generation Nexus design win that is expected to launch at Google I/O. We still expect to see some great tablets based on Tegra 4, as Qualcomm, Nvidia's main competitor, had tough time convincing manufacturers to use their chip in tablets.

We have noticed that companies like Lenovo, Toshiba, Dell have a history of working with Nvidia for more than a decade, so it is no surprise to see almost every major computer manufacturer had a Tegra based tablet at one point or another. However, Qualcomm is slowly but surely winning the hearts and minds of notebook / PC manufacturers with a great chip portfolio, and a special weapon in the guise of integrated LTE, something that is still helping the company score new design wins.

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