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Comment by Negative1 | Hacker News Reader

Not interested in Mobile unless it is for autos? That is a pretty big declaration from one of (if not the) worlds biggest GPU manufacturers. Does this spell the end of the Shield or is that not considered mobile?

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It seems apparent to me that the strengths of desktop chip manufacturers don't translate well to mobile. Both Intel and Nvidia have had tremendous problems to compete against ARM / PowerVR. While Nvidia has done a better job, I imagine they are still loosing money on that front. Maybe this is the time for them to acknowledge that and instead concentrate on markets where local data parallel computations are actually useful and currently feasible (due to power requirements). Maybe mobile might get there as well (real time on-chip image recognition), but it's still years off I think.

Both Intel and Nvidia have had tremendous problems to compete against ARM / PowerVR. While Nvidia has done a better job

Has Nvidia had any success at all in mobile? At least Intel has managed to get some Atom chips in some obscure Dell tablets and Asus mobile phones.

I'm very curious about this - Nvidia's whole mobile business looks like a flop and Huang's circumspect dismissal of it sounds like sour grapes to me.

They had some wins with the Tegra line... Tegra 3 was pretty big in tablets and phones a few years back. Not sure how well it's going currently. But much better than mobile Atoms for sure.

Well at least they have some performance benchmarks to show for [1] (I wasn't able to find a comprehensive sustained performance-per-watt comparison though, which would be much more interesting) and at least they sold more than half a billion dollars worth of Tegras in 2015. Looking at [2] that's at least substantially more than Intel sold when their mobile business crashed and burned in 2014 [3]. It's however not as much as Intel sold in 2013 and the last quarter of 2015 wasn't good for Nvidia either. Maybe it's fair to say that Nvidia is just learning the same lesson with a bit of delay, but at least they have a very strong pivot going after the car market with rapidly increasing compute requirements.

[1] http://wccftech.com/nvidia-tegra-x1-benchmarks-apples-a8x/

[2] http://marketrealist.com/2015/03/why-nvidia-continues-to-foc...

[3] http://www.extremetech.com/computing/227816-how-intel-lost-t...

Nvidia's chips were in much more popular devices such as the Nexus 7 with Tegra 3. Tegra 2 was in quite a few flagship smartphones at the time, too.

Uhm, yes? Tegra had numerous design wins, including Nexus tablets.

> Has Nvidia had any success at all in mobile?

Delivering good chips for mobile use? Yes. Tegra chips have been showing good results in benchmarks.

But making money out of them? Not so much. The whole mobile chip industry became a race to the bottom (with prices) many years ago and most companies in the business are struggling as Samsung and Apple make their own chips and the rest of the market isn't worth a lot of money.

> Has Nvidia had any success at all in mobile?

In recent years, Google Pixel C, Nexus 9, Nexus 7 (2012), that Project Tango tablet, and Nvidia's own Shield devices (TV, tablets, handheld). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra

Not the best-selling lineup, but a fair amount of developer mind-share thanks to Google's penchant for Nvidia SoCs and Nvidia's own outreach.

VR barely works on the desktop with highend hardware and even then it's far from optimal. It will take a long time until that trickles down to mobile.

Google's recent unveiling of Daydream at IO is aiming for that reality.

https://vr.google.com/daydream/

Daydream and Gear VR cannot do spatial VR (where your head moves left a few inches) which severely limits the immersiveness you can achieve. It's like watching a 360 video on the Vive or Rift. It's not a good feeling. You can look around but it's completely obvious that your head is not modeled in the world.

Unless they invent/integrate tech like Project Tango into most phones and make it work for spatial location this is not a problem that can really be solved on mobile.

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