Nvidia Tegra No Longer Is an SoC for Phones and Tablets

Doesn't surprise me. Qualcomm was lightyears ahead when it came to radio integration which is what OEM's really want. I'm sure they come in at a lower pricepoint too for the entire package so it's really a no brainer. Hopefully Nvidia can find a niche in Cars/TV segment. Their work with Audi/Tesla is really impressive.

 

I like the way Huang responded to these questions - seems very polite, honest, and to-the-point, and I like his ability to look at the bright side without seeming cocky.

While Samsung and Qualcomm were definitely problems to Nvidia's phone marketshare, I get the impression the real problem is power efficiency. The Tegra series is amazingly power efficient for what it does, but it seems like it is far more power hungry than Exynos or Snapdragon. I could be wrong since I never actually seen tests on this, but knowing what nvidia put into their chips and knowing their record of power consumption on x86 GPUs, I can't imagine tegra had the best battery life. I think the tegra series was great for tablets, but if nvidia is straying from tablets too I'm not too sure where they expect to go to make a better profit.

 

Well at least they came clean and said that what they want is money. Too bad 10yrs ago nVidia was the cheaper one with some nice technologies and good performance.

 

I dont think this is the question, but if they put billions of dollars to developp chips ( tegra ), and they dont sell, its not profitable for them, its better to rethink their objectives..

Embedded market is certainly going to grow up, i dont know to what level it could be or if there, i fear, there too, the most profitable chips will again be the low costs one ( not everyone buy high cost cars )...

But, there's not only cars there, AMD as example is allready equip Boeing planes with their GPU APU, for the pilots control screens and plan to equip then them with their SOC. A market where Samsung is allready a lot involved too at many level..

 

I don't recall nvidia ever being the cheapest. I never checked prices at the time the Radeon 9800 Pro came out (that was 10 years ago, right?) but I remember nvidia's prices were always a little on the high side. But, aside from the Titans, I always felt nvidia had decently fair pricing. A lot of what you're paying for is their driver support. AMD/ATI often has better hardware but it takes FOREVER for their drivers to catch up. I don't make upgrades often, so that doesn't really bother me. That being said, I like both companies equally, but I tend to be more inclined to buy AMD since they need the money more.

In another light, I think nvidia tries a lot harder to advance GPU technology (which I like), but I don't like how they try to be so proprietary about it. I find nvidia to be a greedier company - they're kind of like pharmaceutical companies, where they create something for the good of everyone but they DEMAND you do things their way and pay their price, which kind of defeats the purpose of their efforts.

 

Nvidia is seemingly universally unwilling to compete on price. If you exclude the price gouging that took place on the AMD cards, 290x is as good or better than the 780ti, while the 780ti remained $200+ more expensive. Where ever the 780 had an advantage, it certainly wasn't large enough to justify the additional cost. Even worse is the Titan which has zero purpose for existence at its price point. How a company can have product that's cost twice the price of the competition's leading product, and a third more than its own "next best" product, and not have it unequivocally trounce either is completely illogical.

 

I am not surprised of this either because I have seen previous generation of tablets have a Tegra chip in them and when you look at the current generation of the same tablets they have a different chip in them instead of the new tegra chip.

 

I don't remember which product launch it was, I think it was G80 but Huang (Nvidia CEO/Founder) basically said that he believes Nvidia sells premium products and Nvidia will probably never be cheaper than the competition. He believes that their work with developers, developing new technology, software, etc sets them above others and as such their products will be priced higher given similar performance.

Now I don't personally know how people feel about this, but I know that speaking to one developer (S2 Games) they felt that Nvidia went above and beyond with helping them in their early days (Savage: Battle for Newerth). They went to both AMD(ATI at the time) and Nvidia and asked for help, ATi basically told them they wouldn't help because they were a small indie developer. Nvidia did the opposite and not only helped them optimize the game for their hardware but helped them get it running on ATi hardware as well.

Now I know Nvidia has had it's fair share of shady practices but knowing multiple devs in the industry and reading the work Nvidia does in other industries as well, they obviously have had a pretty gigantic influence in visual computing for the better.

I've owned AMD cards in the past, I will probably own more in the future, but whenever there is a tie in performance I almost always stick with Nvidia because I at least know my money will help further some R&D/Development in future products where Nvidia is willing to take risks.

 

A lot of people do not care about the SoC inside their phone, they just want it functional at good price point. That which Tegra series are expensive to provide.

 

I am going to call it now but i am willing to bet Nvidia is going to start working closely with Oculus and other HMD companies to focus on improving the VR experience. It is pretty much a done deal that VR\AR is the future and is going to change many aspects of our life. There are many things that can be changed GPU side both in hardware and drivers that can help hugely with VR. There was a post on reddit with a Nvidia engineer who was going over the challenges current GPUs have with VR rendering and how things can be changes to allow a much lower latency and faster rendering, FOV rendering as an example

Watch, Nvidia is going to focus their mobile GPU efforts into future untethered HMDs, and their next gen GPUs will have VR specific tweaks hardware and driver side.

As you can see I have high hopes for the future of VR.

DK2 can't come fast enough !

 

There is an issue with Android mobile/tablet market for nVidia. In segment where they want to be (performance+high price) sits snapdragon chip and while nVidia could somehow compete with 801, they know that they can't match against 805. Not in price nor in performance.
And then there is much smaller x86 mobile/tablet market where nVidia does not have friendly CPU to even peek in.
But can you imagine intel's ULV processor paired with nVidia mobile chip? It would be lovely, but that price tag...

 

This, thats the problem right here, i have seen this endless times, the last one was a dude with a weird 250€ brand phone with 1080p screen and a crappy mediatek soc.

"Damn this game lags has hell, android sucks"
Then i showed to him a 380€ nexus 5
"Nope, your phone SOC sucks"

 

......

 

lol'd

I kinda knew from the beginning that this will be one big flop, power hungry with crap battery and more crap all around.


Nvidia stay at gpu market where you belong, dont make a even bigger fool out yourself. The end.

 

yall reading it wrong

he said they won't be competing for low margin devices and will instead focus on high-performance, computing and gaming

see here

this guy said it the best:

MtVernonCannibisFarms May 20, 2014
slim manufacturing margins and diminishing consumer roi are the rock and a hard place of 'mature' markets .
huang acknowledges this in the article . like selling sand , price per transistor is an ugly place to be .
specializing in how many grains you can pack in a square inch has become insanely expensive and a mature market . nvidia specializes in a niche architectural improvement that is also maturing rapidly and the sand packers are incorporating similar improvements while also having the opportunity to capitalize on the discovery of new types of sand . where the chipmakers are stone masons and architects , nvidia has excelled as a sculptor .

Like DEC , the gpu niche is attempting to expand while being pressed by Big iron and PCs , and all are under assualt by the Mongols of mobile , while the newly arisen horsemen of the apocalypse amazon , google , and facebook ride ...

personally , I'd add some risc cores and try to commoditize the cuda standard , while racing to enable the AI land grab .

like I try to tell microsoft, the investment of tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of personal manhours by every developer learning a technology is your greatest leverage . win that investment and guard it like an adopted child , because with out that share cropper your just selling sand

 

Well exactly, they couldnt compete with portable market because it was too hot and too power hungry.
Also nvidia being nvidia wanted to charge premium for it...


At least that's what I saw with Tegra3 & 4.

 

Yes, somewhat, but tech is not the key here (although it's big factor). It's the business model.
Nvidia is not the sand provider, they are luxury car dealer.
There is no point for them in selling cheaper sand.

Ie. When Tegra is doing "fine" and selling tens of millions *like T3*, all that fine margins job done by GeForce/Quadro/Tesla takes a hit. No more says JHH :banana:

And if/when ALL Phones/Tablets become sand cheap, than idd they won't be competing there.

 

The Titan is very much loved by the compute market. Its essentially a very cheap Tesla (Quadro in some apps). The workstations we use at work all have Titans for rendering, thanks to its large VRAM.

While I feel that buying something from a company to help them isn't a really, smart nor helpful choice, I really agree that AMD drivers are terrible. Having switched from 670s to 7950s with my friend, I absolutely hate AMD's drivers even after a year using them. Two separate machines with fresh installs still suffer from black screens if the GPU is allowed to turn the monitor off. I get all sorts of artifacts in Firefox still, GPU scaling is wonky, display corruption and then the display driver crashes occasionally, and driver support is very slow and rarely helps the issues. While Nvidia isn't free from all issues, I had considerably less aggravation using them.

Regarding Tegra, its to be expected since they haven't really gotten any design wins. I don't doubt that the hardware is capable, but it is most likely just not profitable for Nvidia to engage in a price war with Mediatek, Qualcomm, and the various other SOC makers out there. Like TI, Nvidia's best choice would be to back out and let the others fight it out until there are just a few large firms left, similarly to the GPU/CPU market (hopefully it'll be more interesting than a duopoly).

 

He's talking about the Titan-Z which I kind of agree with him on. I know a few people with Titan's for compute, you're right -- it is popular there. I'm not sure what the purpose of the Titan-Z is. My only guess is people looking for that kind of performance in small configurations, maybe in a rack system somehow or something, I have no idea. Maybe a setup like this:

http://pcfoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/pfcoo_FT77A_8x_Titans.jpg

I mean Tesla K20's are still selling for $5000. So obviously at $3000 with a limited configuration the Titan-Z is going to be a better purchase.

I also don't think nvidia would have just randomly built it without at least some market wanting it.