Nvidia Argues Performance, Features, Price Will Push ‘Tegra 4i’ Chip

Two boards for Nvidia's Tegra reference platform, the one on the right showing Tegra 4 and the i500 discrete modem, the one on the left showing both replaced by Tegra 4i.

I spent some time this afternoon meeting with Nvidia's (NVDA) head of marketing for its Tegra processor line for phones and tablets, Matt Wuebbling, at the company's booth on the floor of the Mobile World Congress.

Nvidia recently introduced an integrated processor, the “Tegra 4i,” which contains both the applications processor and the baseband wireless processor, bringing the company into competition in new markets with Qualcomm (QCOM).

The 4i is a follow-up to Nvidia's recently introduced stand-alone modem, the “i500,” and its brand new Tegra 4 applications processor, combining some of the functionality of each of those In a single silicon die.

The company emphasizes performance capabilities of Tegra, such as its ability to browse the Web at twice the speed of competing quad-core processors. But a large part of what it hopes will be Tegra 4i's appeal will be to come in at a smaller die size than competing integrated processors, and to be able to undercut Qualcomm and others on price, while maintaining profit margin.

For mainstream phones, such as those costing $100 to $300, unsubsidized, which is where 4i is being targeted, “price is almost everything,” says Wuebbling. “It is all about cost” to the phone maker.

The modem component, a reprogrammable “soft modem,” can “do most of those same features” as a discrete modem part in about 40% of the die size area, says Wuebbling. Which means that the integrated chip can combine application and modem functions without being as large as other integrated chips of comparable performance. That saves on the cost it takes to make the part, and saves phone makers board space and power requirements.

The stand-alone i500 is expected to ship in the latter half of this year, while the 4i will ship toward the end of this year.

When I asked Wuebbling if Nvidia are effectively rookies in a wireless modem business where Qualcomm has decades of experience shipping modems, he points out that the first generation was developed in 2006 by Icera, which Nvidia acquired in 2011. Nvidia in fact sold the previous generation of Icera modem, the “i400″ for Asus tablet computers that AT&T (T) carries, and also phones by ZTE. “Icera had never sold into handsets or tablets before,” days Wuebbling. “They wouldn't have been able to sell into a handset until we came in, because the handset and the vendors wanted there to be a bigger, established company behind the effort.”

Wuebbling concedes that “perhaps you could say we're now on our second generation of selling a modem chip, I think that's fair to say.

Nvidia shares today are up 12 cents, or 1%, at $12.35.