At Mobile World Congress, we heard a lot about Qualcomm and its Snapdragon S4 chips being utilised as 4G LTE alternatives to NVIDIA's Tegra 3 in US devices and, many of us are left wondering just why firms felt the need to spread themselves across two separate SoCs from two completely different manufacturers.
Despite one's initial thoughts, NVIDIA does have a 4G LTE offering, which it calls its 'Icera' modem. These modems are no off-the-shelf stock offerings either, with the Icera featuring support and acceleration for Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and LTE gaming.
VoLTE is vitally important for network providers, as it enables firms to move new HD voice traffic, based on Adaptive Multi-Rate-Wideband (AMR-WB) from 3G to 4G seamlessly, allowing networks to make the transition away from 3G to one day free up the spectrum, making more room for LTE.
Within Icera is a software defined radio (SDR) that is capable of supporting current and future handover capabilities across networks between 2G, 3G and 4G and as such, according to NVIDIA, the Icera is currently being used "more than any other modem to validate LTE handover test cases designed to meet the requirement set by global standards organisations."
With its unique SDR capability, the Icera will be software upgradable and tunable by both OEMs and carriers, allowing NVIDIA to place LTE FDD, TD-LTE, 42Mbps Dual Carrier, TD-SCDMA, HSPA+, HSPA and 2G technoligies on its 2012-2013 roadmap for the Icera modem. With the modem handling all of the handover functionality for the device, it's possible to create phones with simplified, single radio designs, which feature efficient and offloaded switching, resulting in an improved battery life and smaller phone designs.
With all this in mind, we're a little perplexed as to why the Icera wasn't able to stave off Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 LTE devices. We can only assume, that with so much functionality and the already high cost of quad-core SoCs, that a solution involving both the Tegra 3 and the Icera modem proved too costly for OEMs, that, or NVIDIA is not yet producing the levels of silicon required for a large scale deployment.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to further battle against Qualcomm's S4 range, which is capable of competing with the Tegra 3's quad-core design with only dual-core offerings, NVIDIA has reportedly begun sampling Tegra 4 silicon to OEMs, likely to wind up in devices towards the end of the year or first thing 2013, with an over-clocked Tegra 3+ expected to hold the line in the meantime.
NVIDIA is also looking to cover all of its bases by offering the Tegra 2 with a fully integrated Icera modem for entry-level devices, with a view to an integrated modem variant from the Tegra 4 onwards.
