Now nvidia *and* qualcomm integrate compute and wireless
Four months ago NVIDIA announced the acquisition of Icera, a baseband solution provider. Icera's technology didn't make it into any smartphones but it did have some success in the USB modem market. The obvious impteus for the acquisition was to eventually integrate Icera basebands into NVIDIA Tegra SoCs, providing a "single chip" solution for those customers who want it. Currently Qualcomm is the only major SoC player to offer an application processor with integrated baseband with its Snapdragon SoC.
After the acquisition was announced NVIDIA wouldn't commit to any timeframe for integrating Icera's technology, even going as far as to say that many customers weren't demanding that level of integration at this point. Yesterday NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang confirmed that we'd see a mainstream Tegra offering with an integrated "3G/4G" baseband from Icera in 2012 alongside its Wayne SoC. This integrated SoC is codenamed Grey. Xbit Labs was the first to report on the story and we just confirmed it with NVIDIA.
Grey will coexist with Wayne. Jen-Hsun referred to Grey as being able to address the "majority of the smartphone market" indicating that it may be a smaller design than Wayne. NVIDIA has yet to confirm the architecture behind Wayne (or Grey) at this point, but we can only assume that by 2012 it'll be time for NVIDIA to shift to Cortex A15 at 28nm.
NVIDIA Announces "Grey", First Tegra SoC with Integrated Baseband Due in 2012
Four months ago NVIDIA announced the acquisition of Icera, a baseband solution provider. Icera's technology didn't make it into any smartphones but it did have some success in the USB modem market. The obvious impteus for the acquisition was to eventually integrate Icera basebands into NVIDIA Tegra SoCs, providing a "single chip" solution for those customers who want it. Currently Qualcomm is the only major SoC player to offer an application processor with integrated baseband with its Snapdragon SoC.
After the acquisition was announced NVIDIA wouldn't commit to any timeframe for integrating Icera's technology, even going as far as to say that many customers weren't demanding that level of integration at this point. Yesterday NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang confirmed that we'd see a mainstream Tegra offering with an integrated "3G/4G" baseband from Icera in 2012 alongside its Wayne SoC. This integrated SoC is codenamed Grey. Xbit Labs was the first to report on the story and we just confirmed it with NVIDIA.
Grey will coexist with Wayne. Jen-Hsun referred to Grey as being able to address the "majority of the smartphone market" indicating that it may be a smaller design than Wayne. NVIDIA has yet to confirm the architecture behind Wayne (or Grey) at this point, but we can only assume that by 2012 it'll be time for NVIDIA to shift to Cortex A15 at 28nm.
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