I hope they did can it, it really is too few too late.
Overall and whereas I know I might be part of the 0.1% here I'm hoping for Nvidia to change its approach of this market.
I think they are trying to hard to make a dent in the high end, I would say it is in their DNA. Though I think they are not playing their strength properly, and that comes from somebody they seriously contemplated the option of buying a tegra note 7 this Christmas.
I was to post something in those lines of thinking a couple of weeks ago and decided to pass, I watched yesterday the podcast Anand made with an ARM Fellow and changed my mind, especially the part about the thriving market of mid end devices for which MotoG is a poster child.
My belief is that Nvidia focus too hard on hardware excellence and proprietary solutions. In turn their time to market suffers.
IMHO what they need is, for now at least, focus on mid range products and use off the shelves ARM solutions (on the CPU side obviously).
Hardware is ubberly important for Nvidia so is software, actually software might be the main reason for Nvidia position in the PC realm. My take is that on a market where they have no name, where costumers are clueless, software support, long term software support, is going to do a lot more for the brand than attemtps at performance leadership.
I don't think Nvidia needs crazy quad cores, insane gpu to succeed and a sustainable place for it self on the market, what they need is well rounded hardware and support, the type of support you have on iOS or Nexus devices.
One thing they do right is Tetra zone and matching optimized games. They do it with their GPU cards, their strength should be to provide the same level of support in the mobile world.
Nvidia should rhyme with "safety" on costumers perception IMHO that is what they should aim for.
Back to hardware Nvidia should refrain to spread it self too much, they are excellent there is not disputing it, but they are not Qualcomm or Samsumg or Apple, both in man power and brand recognizion.
In the podcast Anand made he asked the ARM fellow about his dream set-up for a mobile device on the upcoming node. His answer was 2 A57 and 4 A53, both clusters clocked conservatively wrt to PR standards. PR standards are not useless but they are more relevant in the high end than in the mid range.
Again MotoG is proof for that you don't need crazy specs on that segment just a consistant product and support. I belief is that Nvidia is in a great position to provide that type of product now they bought Icera.
Ultimately NV tries to sell pretty high end SoC, with matching power consumption and those chips end in pretty mid range devices of not lower. Luckily they are keeping.g die size under control. Yet my take is that they would be better providing proper mid range SoC (what Tegra4i could have been if not so late).
Keeping in mind that ARM fellow dream set-up, I would think that for example a great product that could have launched in place of Tegra 4 as we know it could have consisted of:
1 A15 and 2 A7 cores, with GPU more akin to the one in the Tegra 4i. Not crazy on the paper, like the moto G, but with proper support (OS and Games) it might very well have turned into a class defining SoC.
On the other hand I think their move with the Tegra Note is great, they should stick to that approach and actually extend it to phones.
For this CES I've few hopes, they may have great things to showcase on the gpu front but overall I expect them to pay to high a price in power consumption. I'm also expect them to be late to the ARM v8 party Apple got started.
Still I see a lot of potential in Nvidia, just I think are almost too ambitious.
