He noted that Nvidia is still a relative newcomer to the mobile market and described Intel and AMD as “companies from our world.” Asked to comment his often vocal criticism of Intel, Huang said: “We are friends now; a lot of water under the bridge. I see the two of us being much more collaborators than competitors.”
Then he went on to a more uncomfortable subject – Microsoft’s Surface RT.
“I will say that Surface has been a big disappointment for us and for Microsoft. Both of our expectations from the product were much greater than what came to be and not only that. We invested enormous amount into research and development and spent a lot of time and energy into it,” he said.
Huang went on to say that he is still delighted to have been a part of the Surface project. To be fair the flop was hardly Nvidia’s fault. The Surface RT wouldn’t have done much better with any other ARM SoC under the bonnet.
While Nvidia and Intel may be “friends” now, the same courtesy doesn’t apply to Qualcomm. Commenting Tegra 4 delays, Huang said there is clearly only one competitor and only one company with LTE at the moment – and we all know who that is.
“I think we stand the chance to be the second one. And I thought LTE was sufficiently important to delay Tegra 4. I believe that was a good decision. Business comes and goes and we make a strategic decision that could lead you to whole new place,” he said.
