NVIDIA CEO Warns Competitors To Go Mobile
Chipmaker NVIDIA Corp. went through a major overhaul in developing a new line of business: mobile CPUs. It launched its first smartphone CPUs in 2008 and saw only moderate traction. But it soldiered on, launching Tegra 2 in January 2010, a product which brought it far greater success.
NVIDIA’s outspoken Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang is now a major evangelist for the mobile market. He warns in a CNET interview, “If you don’t have a mobile strategy, you’re in deep turd. If you’re not in mobile processors now, you’re seven years too late.”
He singled out Hewlett-Packard Comp. as a company with a lack of mobile vision. Hewlett-Packard announced its intention to try to exit the consumer electronics market a few weeks ago, making plans to spin off its consumer PC/Printer division and killing its first tablet after only seven weeks on the mark. While he did not say it, he perhaps also was alluding to long-time rival Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), who still refuses to target the smartphone business.
Mr. Huang also had harsh words for competitor Intel Corp., who has struggled to bring mobile products to the market. He believes that compatibility will be a major issue for Intel’s low-power Atom CPU line, as it’s an x86 architecture and the majority of smartphone apps are compiled for ARM processors like Tegra. He remarks, “They’re speaking the wrong language. We’re not worried about them at all.”
Looking ahead, NVIDIA recently began shipping its Kal-El quad-core Tegra 3 chip, aimed primarily at tablets. But perhaps more importantly, in May NVIDIA acquired fellow mobile chip-maker Icera for $367M USD in cash. The purchase gives NVIDIA the capacity to put wireless modems into its system-on-a-chip, similar to its rival Qualcomm. Previously NVIDIA lacked both the licensing permissions and the expertise to do this.
NVIDIA expects the mobile market to eventually become its most important business. While the graphics market is only expected to grow 75 percent by 2015 to $7B USD, the mobile chip business is estimated to grow over 1,000 percent in that same time frame to reach $20B USD. By 2015 the number of smart phones in the wild is projected to rise from 100 million to 1 billion, worldwide.
Still, NVIDIA plans to stick with the graphics business as well, where it perceived strong sustained demand for better graphics. Mr. Huang compares graphics current position to that of digital SLR cameras, pointing out that while they didn’t see growth like smart phone point-and-shoot camera modules, they also weren’t hurt by the push to mobile. NVIDIA is bullish on the idea of general purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing, a burgeoning field.
[via Daily Tech]
Category: News
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