Nvidia Tegra TK1 is being shunned by major phone designers as if it were suffering from ebola, our industry sources have confirmed.
It looks like that 2013 is the year of Qualcomm and that every significant design win has Qualcomm processor inside.
Mediatek is trying the Tegra TK1with the entry level phones but they still have to prove themselves in the mainstream and high end phones that the European or USA phone market craves. They could get there in time, but didn’t manage it in 2013.
Tegra TK1 32-bit quad core managed a few design wins but none of them were in phones. Nvidia is using the chip for its own Jetson TK1 development board that gathered some nice revenues. There was also the Shield tablet, which was not eaten by Hydra, the Acer Chromebook 13, HP Chromebook 14, Lenovo ThinkVision 28 and the XiaoMi MiPad.
The XiaoMi tablet seems to be selling like hotcakes, although, since most of the sales are in China, the word hot cakes should probably be steamed pork buns. The XiaoMi tablet almost resembles Nexus 9 specification, if you look at it in the right light, but sells for half of its price. The Tegra TK1 64 bit, aka Denver, won a design award with the HTC Nexus 9 and this looks like it will sell in buckets. Nvidia also has Google Project Tango tablet, but this won't sell in any serious numbers as this is more of a developer's toy rather than a retail product.
However by the end of October 2014 there was no a single phone design win with Tegra K1 32-bit or 64-bit. Nvidia Tegra 4i Gray chip was greeted with a loud sounding yawn when it showed in a Wiko Wax , Blackphone and LG G2 mini LTE for the South American market. None of them was really a huge seller for Nvidia.
The 64 bit Tegra K1 might get some attention but it looks like that phones based on 64 bit Tegra K1 Denver might not show up until early 2015 at the earliest. Meanwhile the Snapdragon 810, Qualcomm's 64-bit high chip will appear at the Mobile World Congress phone by that time. People are already claiming that the Snapdragon 810 is inside of Samsung Galaxy S6 and we would be surprised if it was not in the LG G3 successor (LG G4) or HTC M8 successor which will probably be dubbed the HTC One M9.
This doesn’t leave Nvidia much space for success in phones but then again Tegra is selling in cars, developers’ boards (such as Jetson Dev Kit), Chromebook and the occasional tablet.
No-one can win in all markets and it seems that Tegra powered Chromebooks perform quite well and that Nvidia is top choice for most car manufactures. However the phone market that might be too hot for Nvidia Tegra TK1 32-bit to handle. We will see if Denver, the 64-bit Tegra K1 or its successor can change things in 2015.
