In an interview with CNET, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that the company will no longer design or produce Tegra chipsets for mobiles and tablets. In fact, NVIDIA will no longer focus on that market.
A few months ago, NVIDIA was confident that Tegra 4i would be its golden ticket into the smartphones and tablets market. Evidently, this didn't pan out as planned.
[Tegra 4i] wasn't that successful for us," admitted Huang. "I would say that when we first started this, we thought that bringing 4G to entry-level phones, mainstream phones, integrated with our apps processor would be a real opportunity."
"I think that the phone marketplace has commoditized really, really fast," he explained. "It is not our strategy to go after commodity phones. It is not our strategy to go after mainstream devices. But our strategy is to focus on performance-oriented, visual computing-oriented, gaming-oriented devices where we can add a lot of value.
Huang believes that the majority of mobile users are more concerned about price than performance and that's not how NVIDIA likes to compete. "I think that for mainstream phones, there's one strategy that really works right now, which is price," he claimed. "That's not our differentiator. That's not what we do for a living."
In the end, Huang hinted that NVIDIA has no plans for new Tegra chipsets. "We don't talk about future products, but I also haven't talked about T5i," he said.