“Nvidia doesn’t and hasn’t ever addressed the bottom 70% of the market, right. For a lot of applications, if you are doing e-mail, browsing, those kinds of things, using the integrated graphics that comes inside of your notebook or your PC is just fine,” he said.
The same philosophy applies to Tegra. The low-end and mid-range space is much more competitive, so Nvidia doesn’t want to take on the likes of Mediatek and Qualcomm.
“Our strategy with Tegra is the same as it is with our GPU business. Within the GPU business, we do not target 100 percent of the PC market. As I mentioned earlier, 70 percent of the PC market does not need an Nvidia GPU. What we do is we target PCs where visual computing matters,” he said. “Our strategy with Tegra is exactly the same. We target segments of the Android market where visual computing matters and we don’t address a majority of the market, because it doesn’t matter for a lot of that market.”
Csongor admitted that Nvidia was late with Tegra 4, but he stressed that it will not be late with the next generation part. He expects to see growth in the Tegra business through 2014, starting this quarter. Csongor added that the Android market is diversifying, with new form factors including AIO PCs, clamshells, set-top boxes and car infotainment systems.
Nvidia is focusing on every market where visual computing matters, from high-resolution tablets, through infotainment systems to smartphones designed with an emphasis on GPU performance. Nvidia can’t and won’t target high-volume markets.
Tegra 5 is expected to feature a vastly superior GPU that could finally give Nvidia a competitive edge in the SoC space, hence the approach won’t change anytime soon. Meanwhile the Tegra 4i packs the most powerful GPU of any mid-range part out there, coupled with four cheap A9r4 CPU cores.
You can check out the full transcript of the analyst call over at Seeking Alpha.