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by Lucian Armasu on Mar 13, 2012 |
Nobody
seems to have a perfect launch in the chip industry. Sometimes they get
it right, sometimes they don’t. Their only consolation is that their
competitors can have the same problem. We’ve been upset with Nvidia for
delaying, for months at a time, both the Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 chips, but
the others have had and have delays, too.
The OMAP 4460 at 1.5 Ghz
was supposed to come out last fall, but so far we still haven’t seen it
yet, and they’re likely to just skip it and jump straight to the OMAP
4470 for most of their customers, although Archos will probably continue
with their delayed plan to offer a couple of OMAP 4460 tablets. The
OMAP 5 was also promised for the next fall, but we’re likely to see it
first early 2013 instead.
This brings me to the Qualcomm S4
production delay, that comes mostly because of issues with the
transition to 28nm of TSMC. Nvidia has been burned before by being an
early adopter of a next-gen processing node, and this might be why they
chose to not have Tegra 3 on 28nm yet, but my guess is we’ll see
something like Tegra 3+ sometime this summer on 28nm or 32nm, and Tegra 4
early next year.
There’s one chip maker that has been more
fortunate so far, and that’s Samsung. I don’t recall any recent issues
or delays with their chips, and if everything remains on track, their
Cortex A15-based Exynos 5250 might take all the thunder from the launch
of the S4 if it comes out around the same time.
If it does, then
from what we know so far, there should be little reason for anyone to
choose an S4 device over a Cortex A15 one – unless Samsung is moving too
slow with it, and Qualcomm and their partners somehow flood the market
with S4 devices, which is also very possible considering Qualcomm is the
market leader right now. That would offer more choices in the market,
and many people might not be willing to wait until their perfect Cortex
A15 device arrives.
Some of the more expected devices that should
have the S4 chip, and will now be delayed are the HTC One S and the
Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 (Asus really needs to streamline these
tablet names, don’t they?). Fortunately for both HTC and Asus, they are
covered with the Tegra 3 chip, so it shouldn’t have too much impact on
their own sales, at least for now. It might affect them if Samsung bets
big on the Cortex A15 chips, and they only have to show the Tegra 3 and
and the 1.5 Ghz S4 in summer (a 2.5 Ghz dual core S4 could change things
a bit. Tegra 3+ might not unless Nvidia surprises us with something
new).
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