NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) Goes Grey

At the same time, Huang expressed confidence in the company’s tablet prospects, with the “vast majority” of NVIDIA’s growth coming from that form factor. NVIDIA has had more design wins in tablets than Qualcomm, including high-profile wins in the Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) Nexus 7 and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Surface RT.

We’ve only just begun
Launching an applications processor with an integrated baseband will give NVIDIA more ammo in its battle with Qualcomm. Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) has also been trying to land design wins in mobile devices, but has negligible traction thus far. However, Intel won’t achieve this level of cellular integration with its mobile processors until 2014.

NVIDIA is hoping to see Tegra 4i devices start shipping by year’s end, although the majority of gadgets probably won’t appear until early 2014. That will also be somewhat of a challenge considering the core being used in the chip. By 2014, the market will mostly be transitioned to more powerful processors so the Cortex-A9 r4 might not look as competitive in a year, especially compared to the regular Tegra 4.

Up until recently, Qualcomm has had a firm grip on both the discrete LTE baseband and integrated LTE baseband markets. Both segments will come under fire from Broadcom and NVIDIA, respectively. This competition is only now really just beginning.

The article NVIDIA Goes Grey originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Evan Niu, CFA.

Fool contributor Evan Niu, CFA, owns shares of Apple and Qualcomm. The Motley Fool recommends Apple, Google, Intel, and NVIDIA. The Motley Fool owns shares of Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Qualcomm.

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