Nvidia CEO Admits Tegra 4i Didn't Pan Out as Hoped
Nvidia's CEO talks about Tegra 4i, a $3,000 graphics card, and more.
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.

No !@#$ sherlock!
instead nv got butkicking from mediatek. what excuse will they use when mediatek expands to high end?
Cannot wait for him to leave that company.
I believe his strategy is abandon ship.
This is going to be an interesting year in the GPU market.
Still though for 3k it has to really beat AMDs 1500 dollar model, or even those customers won't go for it.
I would love to have a tegra 4 / k1 device, but the market lacks products with it.
Till then i guess i will stick with snapdragon.
T4i I think is a pretty good processor considering it marginalizes snapdragon 600 only running at a lowly 1.7Ghz... even though it can run upto 2.3Ghz
Seems like a strange leap to say someone will go from 1080 to 4K and then realize they do not have enough GPU horsepower then drop an ADDITIONAL 3k on the card to drive a top of the line panel. Plenty of sub-$1000 4ks out there now (although they all stink for gaming atm.)
Seems like a strange leap to say someone will go from 1080 to 4K and then realize they do not have enough GPU horsepower then drop an ADDITIONAL 3k on the card to drive a top of the line panel. Plenty of sub-$1000 4ks out there now (although they all stink for gaming atm.)
Plenty of graphics cards out there that are capable of driving a 4K display for less than $3000...... GTX780Ti Tri-Fire would easily do the job for under $3000.... 3x R9 290X CF would also do the job.
With IGPs starting to compete with ~$100 discrete GPUs, I suppose Nvidia will bailing out of that market segment too.
It is a slippery slope when you start giving up on markets because the feature/performance/cost bar is rising too quickly for your liking.
That's not why they left. The profit vs investment was too little for them to bother with. Companies do not have infinite resources nor infinite people, they need to pick and chose where they will leverage their capabilities in order to generate profit. NVidia simply decided there were too many low-cost low-margin players already in the smartphone market and that there wasn't a demand for a high powered / high cost graphics unit. They didn't cancel Tegra 4, quite the opposite. They used it in a special purpose hand held gaming device designed to run android games which is an emerging market. There is a demand from people for an open ended mobile gaming platform running Android, you can see this by the sheer volume of Blue Tooth enabled gamepads for consumers to turn their smartphones into a mobile gaming platform. NVidia noticed this and is now leveraging it's OpenGL graphics experience to produce a handheld special purpose gaming device that runs any Android game.
So instead of trying to compete with Qualcomm, Broadcomm, Samsung, and all the rest, they targeted Nintendo.
If a phone or tablet manufacturer wanted to use Nvidia chipsets they had to wait for Nvidia to write drivers to upgrade their version of Android. It's the EXACT reason Motorola bailed on using Tegra chips.
All I can say is, I hope they continue to evolve Maxwell for desktops, I'm loving my GTX 750 ti and the amazing performance for virtually no power draw. It may never make it to phones but damn, its one hell of a chip.
NV had 3 generations of mobile SoC failures, and 1 gen of moderate accomplishment. Never success.
So instead of trying to compete with Qualcomm, Broadcomm, Samsung, and all the rest, they targeted Nintendo.
Who has Nintendo been losing mobile gaming market share to for the past six years? Mostly tablets and phones running Qualcomm, Broadcomm, Samsung and Mediatek SoCs.
The market for single-purpose-built mobile gaming devices is shrinking mainly in favor of those commoditized multi-purpose devices. If Nvidia does not want to play that game, they might be better off bailing out right now and sparing themselves the embarrassment of losing an inevitable uphill battle. I have a hard time imagining Tegra being worth much if its key selling point remains acting as a remote terminal for PCs with Nvidia GPU(s) in them.
Seems like a strange leap to say someone will go from 1080 to 4K and then realize they do not have enough GPU horsepower then drop an ADDITIONAL 3k on the card to drive a top of the line panel. Plenty of sub-$1000 4ks out there now (although they all stink for gaming atm.)
Plenty of graphics cards out there that are capable of driving a 4K display for less than $3000...... GTX780Ti Tri-Fire would easily do the job for under $3000.... 3x R9 290X CF would also do the job.
Yup that was my point - I don't buy the logic that you get a killer 4K display and then must automatically say "now I must have a Z". Seemed a weird jump in logic by him.