Nvidia set for first tier one phone deal, Motorola in frame

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Nvidia set for first tier one phone deal, Motorola in frame

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 1 July, 2009

READ MORE: Motorola

The vital importance of graphics technology to the smartphone race was highlighted this week when Apple upped its stake in specialist chip company Imagination Technologies, hard on the heels of a similar move by Intel. Now Nvidia, which has been trying for 18 months to move its PC graphics business into the mobile market, is said to have made a breakthrough at last, claiming its Tegra system-on-chip will feature in a Q4 smartphone release by one of the top five.

But which one? The smart money seems to be on Motorola, with Samsung also a possibility. Michael Rayfield - general manager of Nvidia's mobile unit and the man who has steered the firm through the high risk process of taking on Texas Instruments' OMAP and others - told TheStreet.com that he expected Tegra to "debut in a phone from one of the top five cellphone makers" in the fourth quarter. Nvidia first set out its attack on the smartphone applications/graphics processor market early in 2008 but has not yet made significant impact, though it has turned up in some Taiwanese ODM models and will be in the new Microsoft Zune HD.

There have also been persistent rumors that HTC would adopt Tegra in some models this year, but the Taiwanese firm does not yet make it into the top five. It seems highly likely that Nvidia will be relying on the expected rush of Android phones to make its commercial mark. Tegra, so far, runs only with Android and Windows Mobile/CE - hence the fit with HTC. This also rules out Nokia - which, anyway, seems still devoted to OMAP - plus others from outside the top five such as Apple and RIM.

On the Android front, in theory any of the top five except Nokia could be using Tegra, since all are planning Android launches in time for the holiday buying season. Motorola seems the most likely. Sony Ericsson has made strong use of OMAP. Despite the Samsung rumors, and the fact that both Korean vendors spread their favors widely among different chip vendors - even in areas where they have their own processors - Motorola is the firm that should be looking to a whole new architecture, given the exhaustion of the current ones, and to some advanced components that could give it differentiation.

Nvidia said at June's Computex show in Taiwan that there are now 20 mobile internet devices in production based on Tegra, and that Tegra II is due next year. Interest from the ODMs often prefigures uptake by branded manufacturers a year or so later. Among the products are netbooks from Compal, Inventec, Mobinnova, Pegatron and Wistro; and tablets or MIDs from ICD and Mobinnova.

The Tegra 600-series SoC is based on an ARM11 processor, with the GeForce graphics core, low power DDR memory controller, NAND flash memory controller, and HD video processor. The smallest Tegra consumes less than one watt of power, and measures 144 millimeters square. Nvidia initially showed its hand in the smartphone market at the Mobile World Congress in February 2008, saying it believed the mobile application processor sector would be worth $6bn by 2012. There, it unveiled its first bid to broaden its revenue streams, the APX 2500 apps processor, geared to 3D user interfaces and high definition video, with an ecosystem of partners and a touchscreen reference platform. This appeared to go head-to-head with Texas Instruments' OMAP 3 architecture.