A few years ago the mobile processor market was rife with competition. Things were fairly new back then and we had companies such as Texas Instruments, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm, all vying for a slice of the pie, but ultimately it seems that Qualcomm has stolen the show as the majority of mobile devices these days are powered by the company’s chipsets.
So much so it seems that NVIDIA no longer thinks that it’s necessary to develop their own LTE modems and has announced that they will be winding down their LTE modem development operations. The company had acquired Icera back in 2011, which is a company that makes baseband chips.
However over the years it seems that the market has shifted in a way that has caused the company to reshape “its strategy to focus on high-growth opportunities in gaming, automotive and cloud computing applications like deep learning, where its visual computing expertise is greatly valued.” Once operations has wound down completely, NVIDIA expects that they will team up with third-party modem suppliers in the future and will no longer develop its own.
The last time we saw NVIDIA use the Icera modem in one of their chipsets was in 2013 with the Tegra 4i chipset. The chipset was later used in the security-focused Blackphone but given the phone wasn’t exactly a commercial success, it’s not hard to imagine why NVIDIA would want to call it quits.
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