NVIDIA struggles to secure Tegra 4 orders, only Toshiba is interested

Last month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NVIDIA showed off their latest chip for smartphones and tablets, the Tegra 4. It's got four ARM Cortex A15 cores, one incredibly fast graphics processor, and the whole package is allegedly six times faster than the Tegra 3, but we're not going to believe that until we run our own benchmarks.

Sounds like a great chip, right? According to our favorite Taiwanese rumor site DigiTimes, it seems that device makers are not that interested. Only one company has so far committed to using the Tegra 4, and that's Toshiba.

Why is this happening? The DigiTimes report says companies are more interested in using chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek. We don't blame them. Qualcomm offers companies a system on chip with integrated cellular connectivity, something the Tegra 4 sadly lacks. Sure, NVIDIA will gladly sell you their new soft modem, the i500, but it's completely unproven, whereas Qualcomm has built an amazing reputation for themselves in the wireless space during the past few years.

And as for MediaTek, they're the leader when it comes to supplying cheap chips for devices that don't get sold outside of China and a handful of other Asian countries. MediaTek's quad core chip is probably an order of magnitude slower than the Tegra 4, but do you think the person buying a $100 tablet really cares about that?

In a few short weeks the largest mobile convention of the year is going to kick off, Mobile World Congress. There's a high probability that we're not going to see any devices announced there that use the Tegra 4, so don't sit on the edge of your seat. We'll know more about the fate of NVIDIA's latest chip during the second half of the year. By then Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 600 and 800 chips will be out, so it's going to be one hell of an interesting fight to watch.

Nvidia Shield up for pre-order ahead of schedule

by Bogdan Bele, 5 days ago

The Nvidia Shield is up for pre-order, three days earlier than initially announced, with the delivery set for June. Although Nvidia has announced in a blog post that pre-orders for the Tegra 4 Android gaming…

Comments

amine ELouakil

Am I the only one finding the Ouya overly expensive, especially with the developpement cost and reduced risks being paid of by the kickstarter compagn, I’m sure we will start seeing some under 50€/$ Android consols from the chinese side
- APai
  
  huh ? how is $100 to begin with, too expensive ?
  - amine ELouakil
    
    100$ for an Ouya and what it offers is too much. a Rapberry Pi does almost the same thing, and it is not manufactured at full scaled (so it cost way more than the lowest price it can achive) and with respecteable marging,and it cost 25$.
    
    On another note a Wii mini cost 99$ and we are talking about a consol that allows Nintendo to has it marging. heck even the PS3 and XBOX 360 will be droping to 150$ rance once the new gen consol are released (which is immenent)
    - APai
      
      I think the ouya is significantly better than raspberry pi in terms of design & hardware. a tegra 3 vs broadcom 700 ? I think tegra 3 wins in comparison. raspberry pi was not meant for gaming, it was for a general computing platform. plus ouya even has some custom software.
      
      as a startupthey probably need the money starting off, they could always drop the price later. clearly wii/ ps3/ xbox have mega corporations behind them. their whole game plan is in charging for subscription/ most of their games are frightfully expensive in comparison, often times as much as the cost of a raspberry pi!
      - amine ELouakil
        
        “tegra 3 vs broadcom 700″ both are outdated and cheap SoC. and yes the Tegra 3 is more powerfull, but again the Raspberry was an example, I don’t think it will change the price much if they switch to Tegra 3 or an even more powerfull chip.
        
        “raspberry pi was not meant for gaming, it was for a general computing platform”
        
        As your smartphone, you think the Ouya is any different than the RaspBerry in terms of composition (sure the componants are not the same)? they are using existing architecures and designs.
        
        “plus ouya even has some custom software”
        
        I’m sorry but you don’t know what you are talking about here you can basically do whatever you want with it, use it with Android, Ubuntu or other custom linux variation
        
        “as a startupthey probably need the money starting off, they could always
        drop the price later. clearly wii/ ps3/ xbox have mega corporations
        behind them”
        
        In fact is quite the opposite, when you have your whole project funded with a kickstarter, you know the harderst part in terms of funding a project is evaluating risk and profitability,Investors and banks would ask for counterpart and guarranties, and they’ll will want an income for their investissement according to the risk! the kick starter solved both problems, funding, and profitability were achieved from the start, not only that but since it proven to be quite lucrative, more investissement will be rainning on the Ouya group
        
        “experience in creating controllers”
        
        The Ouya controller is more or less a knockoff of existing product, it’s cheaply made according to review and not to mention you can get chinese controllers that are better than Ouya for less than 3$ for wired and 10$ for wireless just check ebay for unbranded controllers.
        
        “MS/ sony is in charging for subscription/ most of their games are
        frightfully expensive in comparison, often times as much as the cost of a
        raspberry pi!”
        
        they do charge you for several reasons one of them is that the consols at their launch date are more expensive to make than their sell price so it’s a long term investissement and they need to get their money back somewhere, the other part is that there are many agreements involved in the gaming industry licencing and stuff for example, the other part is the PC/Consol game some of them at least takes years and millions $ in developement unlike mobile games which are made by teams of 1 to 5 persons in general and doesn’t take that much to make and when it’s not the case (which rarely happens the games cost over 15$)
http://www.facebook.com/corbin.rogers.7 Corbin Rogers

Why are we excited about an ex-EA board member? Isn’t that a little counter-productive? I suppose I don’t know enough about the guy to say, but still…