Nvidia is aiming to get its chips into Windows Phones, and will face down Qualcomm with a combined processor/baseband chipset in 2013 called "Grey," according to a set of slides Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed at the Citi Technology Conference last week.
These slides, which are being reported around the Web as "leaked" but are actually public and official, show the fruit of Nvidia's recent acquisition of modem maker Icera, Nvidia execs told PCMag on a conference call. (You can see the slide below.)
The slide is a little confusing, so we got a walkthrough. There's a box with a bunch of operating system logos on the right, for instance. This doesn't imply that a particular new chipset will be tied to a specific OS, just that Nvidia wants to target all of those OSes: Android, Linux, Windows Phone, and Windows 8.
Currently, Microsoft requires Qualcomm chipsets in Windows Phones, although Nvidia said they'd like that to change.
Grey will deliver low-power, small-form-factor chipsets to complement Nvidia's much more powerful "Wayne" line in 2013, the company said. Currently, Nvidia's phone chips must be supplemented with a third-party modem, often from rival Qualcomm. That gives Qualcomm an advantage, as it can sell "single-chip" solutions that combine processors and modems.
Nvidia aims to neutralize that advantage with Grey, making it easier for phone makers to create slimmer, less expensive and longer-lasting phones with Nvidia's hardware on board. That gives Nvidia a pair of phone chipsets: the more-powerful Wayne and the less-expensive Grey.
Grey is still a few generations out, though. Before its 2013 launch, we'll see Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El chipset, which we first demoed in February, along with the even faster "Kal-El Plus," according to Huang's slide.
If Nvidia is still sticking to older plans, a "Tegra 2.5" may appear between the current Tegra 2 and Kal-El, as we reported in January. But Nvidia hasn't said anything about that chipset.
Nvidia's Tegra 2 chips are currently in many Google Android Honeycomb tablets and several top smartphones including the Motorola Photon for Sprint, LG G2x for T-Mobile and Motorola Droid X2 for Verizon Wireless.
By the way, all of these chips are code-named after the secret identities of famous comic book characters. Kal-El is Superman. Bruce Wayne is Batman. Jean Grey is one of the X-Men, also known as Marvel Girl or Phoenix. Nvidia has also said they're working on chips codenamed Logan and Stark, for Wolverine and Iron Man respectively.
