Nvidia announced their first-quarter earnings today and they made $60 million in profit and $924 million in revenue. Ok, congrats. But what we really care about is that the Tegra 3 processor with integrated LTE, codenamed “Grey”, is still not ready, and won’t be until next year.
CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said this during the earnings call:
“Looking forward, you’ll see Tegra 3 LTE phones with partners’ baseband processors in the second half of this year and then next year with our own LTE baseband processors as well.“
A previously-leaked roadmap suggested a delay until 2013, and this statement supports that. Huang also stated that partner baseband LTE chips might take a little longer than expected, arriving towards the end of this year. No reason for the delays were given, but Huang had this to say:
“Although we don’t have LTE at the moment, LTE is predominantly a U.S.-centric phenomenon. Outside of the United States, the big superphone upgrade is quad-core.“
Nvidia is missing out on the U.S. market since phones like the HTC One X are forced to use a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor instead of Nvidia’s Tegra 3 quad-core chip because U.S. carriers are requiring LTE on their high-end devices. The possible saving grace for Nvidia is that Qualcomm is facing shortages of their S4′s, which buys Nvidia some time to catch up.
source: seeking alpha
via: the verge