Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang recently spoke to CNET about why his company is no longer focusing on smartphones. He admitted that the Tegra 4i "didn't pan out," that in a business sense, it just wasn't the success Nvidia hoped for. The phone marketplace has commoditized extremely fast, he said, and it's not Nvidia's strategy to go after commodity phones.
"I think that I learned we are not a commodity player," he said. "Going after something that starts with mainstream should have discouraged us. At the time, it looked like our 4G solution was quite far ahead of the market...But that window's closing very quickly. We're just not a cost player."
Read more: Nvidia Tegra 4i Wiko Wax Hands-on with Benchmarks
Later on in the interview, CNET and Huang talked about paying $3,000 for a graphics card. He was asked how Nvidia made sure that whoever buys it won't see the card become obsolete two to three years down the road. After all, $3,000 is a lot of money; that amount could purchase a decent high-end gaming PC.
"Most of the customers that buy Titan Zs buy it every year," he said. "And the reason for that is the people who buy Titans and Titan Zs have an insatiable need for computing capability, graphics computing capability. So either they got tired of using just a 1,080p monitor, and they just bought a 4K. My Titan all of a sudden's not enough. For a 4K monitor, a $3,000 to $5,000 monitor, I need something bigger to drive it. So that's Titan Z."
Huang also admitted that Nvidia is currently working on a new Shield handheld system. He said that the Shield platform will be what the company will use to turn Android into a great gaming platform. He also said that Android is "an operating system that epitomizes the future of computing."
"It is arguably the world's best mobile operating system that's connected to the cloud," he said. "Cloud computing and mobile computing are intertwined in a way that can't be separated. I also think that cloud connected to mobile and mobile connected to cloud is essential to the future of gaming, as well...And so if the computer platform is evolving into mobile and cloud, there's no reason why we can't imagine that happening to gaming."
"Shield is our platform for making that possible," he added.
To read the full interview, head here.
