Nvidia kills Icera soft modem, refocuses Tegra on automotive design

By Joel Hruska

Nvidia posted its first quarter results yesterday, with strong growth in PC gaming and automotive sales. The GPU manufacturer also announced that it would cease all business operations related to its Icera softmodem technology, with the intent of wrapping up that segment by the second half of the year.

Killing Icera brings an end to one of the more ambitious chapters in Nvidia’s quest for mobile market domination. When Nvidia bought the company in 2011, 4G and LTE support were just beginning to roll out across the United States. After several quiet years with relatively few design wins, Nvidia came out swinging in 2013, with the simultaneous announcement of Tegra 4, 4i, and the Icera i500 stand-alone modem.

In theory, Icera’s modems offered better power consumption and smaller die sizes compared with standalone parts from other companies, while the Tegra 4i’s mixture of 60 GPU cores and a quad-core Cortex-A9 with an integrated LTE modem was meant to serve as Nvidia’s answer to Qualcomm’s dominance of the modem industry. Nvidia foresaw, correctly, that having an integrated modem could be key to the future of smartphone and tablet sales. Unfortunately, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear — though we’ve heard rumors that Icera’s power consumption was much higher than the competition — neither Tegra 4i nor the Icera i500 ever caught on.

In May 2013, Nvidia announced it had actually delayed Tegra 4 to concentrate on bringing Tegra 4i to market, but this additional focus never appears to have yielded much fruit. Nvidia’s first Shield used Tegra 4 and the follow-up Shield Tablet tapped Icera’s i500 if you bought the LTE variant, but I’m not sure if any major US company tapped Tegra 4i or Icera for a large-scale product launch.

The ramifications of that failure were significant. Nvidia is just one of many broadband companies to bow out of the LTE ring, and it’s no accident that Qualcomm’s shadow has grown long in the wake of these departures. Samsung and Intel both have competing LTE solutions (Samsung ships its own modem in the Galaxy S6), but it’s not clear if either company can disrupt Qualcomm’s domination of the modem industry.

A recent report by Anshel Sag of Moore Insights & Strategy revealed how strong Qualcomm’s lead has become. The baseband modem powering the Snapdragon 810 drew significantly less power than the Exynos 303 solution in the Samsung Galaxy Alpha.

Nvidia predicts strong second half on Windows 10, 4K gaming

The Icera shutdown will cost Nvidia some cash, but the company is bullish on the long-term market. It expects a flat-to-down Q2, thanks to pending demand for Windows 10. With DirectX 12, Windows 10, and continued adoption of 4K all hitting more-or-less simultaneously in Q3 and Q4, Nvidia was fairly confident of increased product sales.

Earlier this week, we covered AMD’s CPU and GPU roadmaps and the company’s announcement that it would bring an HBM-capable product to market this quarter. During Nvidia’s analyst call, investors asked Jen-Hsun if he had any comment on AMD’s roadmap or Nvidia’s own near-term plans to adopt technologies like HBM. Jen-Hsun acknowledged AMD as a strong competitor, but turned the question to an emphasis on Nvidia’s software, tools, and ecosystem advances rather than a strict head-to-head comparison. Nvidia is also expected to adopt HBM for its next-generation GPU, codenamed Pascal, and due in 2016.

Interestingly, however, when asked if Nvidia would be adopting 14/16nm technologies in the near future, Jen-Hsun replied that the company had never had process leadership, and that Maxwell demonstrated Nvidia was perfectly capable of wringing additional efficiency and performance-per-watt out of its hardware without needing a new node. Given Maxwell’s overall performance, it’s hard to argue with that logic.