NVIDIA’s Icera acquisition was not about integration was not about integrating baseband onto the processor chipbut about doubling the firm’s opportunity market wise, according to Mike Rayfield, the firm’s general manager of mobile.
Speaking to RCR at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, Rayfield said the purchase gave Nvidia an additional $15 billion in total available market share (TAM) which it could add to its already large system-on-chip (SoC) TAM.
The “innovative team” of “300 amazing engineers” was also a big factor in the Santa Clara company’s decision to buy Icera, said Rayfield who claims the move was simply about “being able to have the second processor on a mobile device.”
“If integration down the line makes sense, we’ll do that, but that wasn’t the objective when we purchased it,” he declared.
Meanwhile, integrated baseband or not, Nvidia is pressing ahead with its mobile processor plans and its next generation Kal-El SoC, which Rayfield describes as “the first mobile quad core super chip.”
“I believe Kal-El, our next generation, will be very well received,” said Rayfield explaining that Nvidia had already done several smartphone and tablet designs based on it and that it was already sampling to customers.
“We’ve shown what’s possible, we’ve shown what we can do,” he added, saying the company was “very happy” with the progress it had made with its current generation. “We won some very nice designs and our customers did some great things with Tegra 2,” he told RCR. This includes tablets like Asus’ Transformer, billed as highly innovative at the show.
“These are products that are really very appealing to a lot of people,” he said adding “I feel pretty good about the roadmap and so far our customers do too.”
