Toshiba Currently the Only One to Adopt Tegra 4?

The usual suspects cited by the oh-so-spotty DigiTimes report that Toshiba is currently the only tablet and smartphone vendor to sign up for Nvidia's Tegra 4 SoC.

Of course, the chip was only revealed less than a month ago at CES 2013, and it won't officially launch until June 2013, so there's still time for device makers to jump on the Tegra 4 bandwagon. But sources appear to think the seemingly slow adoption rate has something to do with competing quad-core platforms developed by Qualcomm, MediaTek and China-based IC design houses.

Sources plead their case by pointing to Asus and Acer which have thus far been aggressive in the tablet sector. Both have reportedly not yet decided whether to place Tegra 4 orders with Nvidia due to a possible shift in focus from 10-inch form factors and above to the cheaper, seemingly more popular 7-inch entry-level market.

On the smartphone front, Qualcomm's close ties with Asus will likely prevent the latter company from choosing Team Nvidia. Sources said Asus will continue steering on the same lucrative Qualcomm-tainted path while setting Tegra 4 aside as a backup solution.

Sources added that in order to regain its momentum, Nvidia may reduce the price of its current Tegra 3 chip to attract entry-level orders from brand vendors. But even with a reduced price, Tegra 3 may not be able to compete in price with solutions from MediaTek and China-based IC design houses, they said.

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  • xpeh
    Looks like Nvidia doesn't have the cash to bribe the manufacturers.
    Reply
  • tmk221
    I'm not surprised, nVidia is usually not the best solution when it comes to price/performance.
    Reply
  • redeemer
    Manufacturers want Qualcomm, furthermore Samsung and Apple have their own SOC's.
    Reply
  • darkchazz
    Any benchmarks of Tegra 4 yet.
    Because Tegra 3 performance is/was complete shite compared to the competition, and nvidia was mainly relying on marketing words like "QUAD-COAR CPU + 12-COAR GPU = 16 COARS OMG ULTRA FASTT BEAST"...

    I'm mainly interested in GPU performance, and in T4 it seems all they did is increasing the number of cores instead of improving the architecture. Big fail.
    Reply
  • scannall
    The Mediatek 6589 looks really interesting, and uses PowerVR SGX 544 for a GPU. Plus it's shipping now. Qualcomm always makes good parts, and nVidia has overhyped their last couple SOC's to vast disappointment.
    Reply
  • killerclick
    10432033 said:
    I'm not surprised, nVidia is usually not the best solution when it comes to price/performance.

    The Nexus 7 begs to differ on the price/performance, still the fastest 7" Android tablet.

    Tegra 3 is 14 months old now, of course there are faster chips. It's not Nvidia's fault Tegra 3 was put in some expensive devices like Transformer Prime/Infinity and Surface RT.
    Reply
  • marcolorenzo
    10432060 said:
    The Nexus 7 begs to differ on the price/performance, still the fastest 7" Android tablet.

    Tegra 3 is 14 months old now, of course there are faster chips. It's not Nvidia's fault Tegra 3 was put in some expensive devices like Transformer Prime/Infinity and Surface RT.

    Well the thing with the Nexus 7 is, Asus/Google are hardly making a dime with each device sold. They are using it to put their foot in the door, that's all. They're not aiming to make a big profit with every sale so it being cheap/has good performance shouldn't be a reflection on the Tegra 3. Also, Tegra 3 may be 14 months old now, but it was never that fast to begin with. I think there was only about a month of difference between the Tegra 3 and the Snapdragon S4 and it was immediately trumped by Qualcomm's offering. I think the only thing they could boast was being the first to come out with a mobile quad-core.
    Reply
  • ronch79
    I'd be interested in a Tegra 4-based laptop. There are rumors that Cortex A15-based SoCs aren't very frugal in terms of energy consumption so that may scare off those thinking about putting it in small devices. Laptop's have a lot more wiggle room in this regard so perhaps it's a good fit. That's of course assuming the device vendor can get the ARM-supporting version of Windows on it.
    Reply
  • Apparently everyone already forgot about Vizio's Tegra 4 tablet?
    http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/vizio-10-inch-tegra/4505-3126_7-35567328.html
    Reply
  • killerclick
    marcolorenzoWell the thing with the Nexus 7 is, Asus/Google are hardly making a dime with each device sold. They are using it to put their foot in the door, that's all. They're not aiming to make a big profit with every sale so it being cheap/has good performance shouldn't be a reflection on the Tegra 3.
    The SOC itself is only a small part of the price, and Nexus 7 is not the only cheap Tegra 3 tablet (Acer 110, 210). Is there a faster 7" tablet at the moment, at any price? I don't think so.


    marcolorenzoAlso, Tegra 3 may be 14 months old now, but it was never that fast to begin with. I think there was only about a month of difference between the Tegra 3 and the Snapdragon S4 and it was immediately trumped by Qualcomm's offering. I think the only thing they could boast was being the first to come out with a mobile quad-core.
    Which tablets had Snapdragon S4 and when was the first of them released? The first Tegra 3 tablet was Asus Transformer Prime I think, and it was released on Dec 1st 2011. When was the first S4 tablet released? Okay, when was the first S4 phone released?

    And finally, the difference between Tegra 3 and Snapdragon S4. Look at http://www.technobuffalo.com/2012/04/11/benchmarked-nvidia-tegra-3-vs-qualcomm-snapdragon-s4/
    It's a comparison between Tegra 3 and S4, and Tegra 3 comes out as the overall winner. This comparison http://androidandme.com/2012/05/smartphones-2/htc-one-x-snapdragon-s4-vs-tegra-3-in-performance-gpu-battery-life-and-web-browsing/ says Tegra 3 wins on gaming, and for other uses it's hard to tell the difference (except S4 has a LTE modem, but that's not really CPU/GPU performance).

    Obviously, new versions of S4 came out since , and those do beat Tegra 3, but that was six months after it was released, so it's clear that Tegra 3 products were the fastest for a period of 6 months at least.
    Reply