Tegra 4 come in at a trickle

Orders for Nvidia's much-hyped Tegra 4 have been limited as OEMs consider other chips instead.

Enthusiasm for Nvidia’s new Tegra 4 chip from OEMs has been muted, as many are favouring cheaper chips from the likes of MediaTek.

While Nvidia has been able to secure commitments from Toshiba, Asus and Hewlett Packard shipment volumes have been limited.  According to sources that spoke with Digitimes, many OEMs may be waiting for the release of the Tegra 4i with an LTE baseband to make high volume commitments.

Nvidia has been able to get Tegra 4 into Hewlett Packard’s Slatebook x2, and Asus’ Transformer Pad Infinity — both of which could be considered wins for the company. However, these are far from Nexus 7 level bestsellers that Nvidia so desperately needs to give Tegra 4 a boost in cred.

Nvidia’s Tegra 4 is surrounded on both sides by fierce competitors: on the high end it has Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and on the low end there very competitive chips from MediaTek to deal with. Plus, despite Tegra’s high price the chip is handicapped by the lack of modern API support. As previously discussed, it won’t support DirectX 11.0, OpenCL, and OpenGL ES 3.0 making it a poor choice for manufacturers making a gaming focused device.

The high-end market that the Tegra 4 is targeting is already quite saturated and not growing. In contrast, the low end low cost market is growing and MediaTek has that virtually locked up. When the world’s next billion people get a tablet or smartphone, it probably won’t be powered by a Tegra SoC.

Source: Digitimes