Back in May 2011 NVIDIA purchased Icera for $367 million. Icera is a company that specializes in cellular modems, and they have roughly 550 patents to backup that claim. When the announcement was made we said that the alarm bells at Qualcomm’s offices probably started ringing. Half of all Android smartphones on the market run on Qualcomm’s chips; why? Because Qualcomm, unlike most other chipset vendors, provides handset makers with a complete platform that not only features an application processor and a graphics processor, but also 3G/4G/WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS and nearly every other form of wireless connectivity you can imagine. In other words, Qualcomm sells companies practically everything they need to make a smartphone. All companies like HTC have to do is basically shove what Qualcomm sells them in a plastic case, pick a screen that doesn’t suck, and then start pumping smartphones out of one of the many factories in China.
Now that NVIDIA can provide companies what Qualcomm has been peddling for several years now, prepare to see a shift in the industry. NVIDIA’s first platform to bundle their Tegra processor with Icera’s modems is called “Grey”, and during NVIDIA’s Q4 2011 financial earning call the company said that devices with “Grey” inside will ship by the end of the year. We don’t have details as to what will make “Grey” special in terms of performance or power efficiency, but all we know is that there’s a new guy in town, and he’s a serious competitor.
It should also be noted that NVIDIA reported $4 billion in sales for calendar year 2011. Tegra, the mobile business, represented just 9% of that. With PC sales slowing, NVIDIA’s bread and butter, and smartphones and tablets booming, it’s pretty obvious that Tegra needs to become a major business unit if the company has any hopes of remaining relevant in the future.
[Via: The Verge]