Phoenix from the flames
NVIDIA has been on a media/analyst tour recently and, inevitably, that means the leak of some PowerPoint slides not apparently meant for general consumption.
In this case they come from German site Heise Online, via Fudzilla, from a technology conference hosted by Citi. The slide below shows a Tegra roadmap up to, and including 2013. As you can see, it follows the roadmap published earlier this year, but Kal-El and Wayne are now only just making it into the years predicted for them.
This is a minor PR hiccup for NVIDIA (apart from the leak itself), which was proudly touting its ‘industry disrupting' cadence of a new chip a year back at MWC. But we're looking at closer to two years separating the launch of Tegra 2 - at CES 2010 - and Kal-El when it's eventually launched.
NVIDIA's spinners have gamely tried to persuade us they're trying to avoid the mistake they made with Tegra 2 - of launching a chip many months before any end-product made an appearance - but it's hard not to conclude things are progressing more slowly than they hoped back in February. Maybe it's all Apple's fault.
We know Kal-El with contain four ARM Cortex A9 cores, so it's unlikely Kal-El+ will changes that. NVIDIA will probably have further optimised the silicon and software to bring about the higher performance implied by the roadmap. This improved version of Kal-El will then branch into two SoC lines - the high-end Wayne and a new codename: Grey, which probably refers to Phoenix from the X-Men.
The key thing about Grey is that is will be designed for lower-end smartphones, and come with Icera baseband chips, which NVIDIA snapped up earlier this year, apparently integrated into the silicon. NVIDIA already feels it gives it main rival Qualcomm a run for its money in the top end, Grey will be intended to tackle the mass-market, where Qualcomm currently has massive market share. Also, note the inclusion of Windows Phone on the slide, where Qualcomm is currently the only player.
NVIDIA is persisting with the ‘superphone' tag, which spawned all these super-hero codenames, to try to distinguish more powerful phones from the rest of them. Apart from the fact that the logical evolution of this nomenclature will be to the megaphone, this tag has limited use so long as there is no definition of what a superphone is.
Another slide from this presentation shows when NVIDIA envisages its new products actively contributing to the bottom line. When we first saw this we thought "so much for not launching too far in advance", as it didn't look like we were getting Kal-El products for another year or so. But note the timeline refers to ‘FY', which is probably ‘financial year'. NVIDIA's FY 2013 begins on 30 Jan 2012, for some reason, so we're on the verge of Q4 of FY 2012.
As you can see we can expect Kal-El tablets in the next few months and phones by the middle of next year. We assume ‘K' refers to the Kepler 28nm generation of GPUs, and this slide would appear to confirm rumours that we're not going to see Kepler until 2012. ‘WoA Tegra' presumably refers to Windows on ARM chips.
