Back in 2011 Nvidia bought a company that specialized in cellular modems. That company was Icera and the purpose was to create smartphone chips with built in connectivity, so that companies won’t have to go to Qualcomm every time. Everyone is waiting for the Tegra 3 + Icera chipset combo, but it appears that only in 2013 we’ll see those.
The combination of CPU, GPU and 3G/4G has made Qualcomm a lot of dollars and Nvidia wants a piece of that too. Nvidia announced during its latest fiscal result reporting that Tegra 3 LTE phones with the Nvidia partners’ baseband processors will come in H2 2012, while 2013 will bring Nvidia’s own LTE baseband processors. This is a crucial decision, since some carriers/phone makers preferred to go with the Snapdragon S4 because of LTE problems they had with the Tegra 3. Thus, Nvidia lost some HTC One X units it could have powered in the USA…
Also, the Qualcomm dual core S4 is beating Nvidia’s quad core processor in benchmarks, so Nvidia has a big problem with Qualcomm’s solutions. Nvidia has to evolve and get a chip on the market with an ARM Cortex A15 processor on board. Right now the Krait core used by Qualcomm is faster than the A9 core used by Nvidia on the Tegra series chipset, but also slower than the A15. However that’s 2013 material.
