Qualcomm Adreno 530 matches Tegra X1?!?

[BenSkywalker]

Ben the nVidia Tegra chips don't have integrated modems and their power consumption has been high.

Margins aren't in the league of being where nVidia wants them in the cell phone market, Qualcomm was under 26% the latest numbers I found in a quick search- nVidia's are at 56%. The modem is a non issue because they don't want to play in that segment. As far as power consumption- you have any links with identical workloads losing to anyone on power consumption?

I really don't know why they are doing this.

Margins. No reason to go after the cell phone market with margins that low. They don't want to be a low price commodity company. 

Their mobile APUs are top notch.

SoC, there is actually a pretty huge technical gap between the two

If they dial back the power consumption a bit they would probably have their processors in a whole bunch of phones and they would be making billions of dollars.

Neither Apple nor Samsung have an integrated modem that can handle all of the various basebands, they are using external chips from Qualcomm. So we have Qualcomm owning the lions share of the SoC market, and also selling modems to everybody and they have annual revenue of around $25B which gives them about $6B in margin. Not a bad number by any stretch of the imagination. Then look at nVidia who is in the $5B in sales range and the ~$2.2B in margin range. So nVidia could use your approach, try to increase Tegra volume by a couple orders of magnitude and reach comparable margins, or take the approach they currently have and shoot for more modest volume gains while simultaneously becoming *THE* dominant player in truly smart cars while remaining the halo part in the mobile sector.

I'm not saying one is the right way to do it, just pointing out that both paths have potentially lucrative outcomes, just one is more in line with nV's long standing goals while the other is quite a different direction.

I find it hard to believe that they can engineer such complex GPUs but then they are unable to integrate something as simple as a modem.

They already had it done, and shut the whole thing down because the margins weren't there. This isn't me speculating, Icera is quite public information.