Investment analyst sees big gains for NVIDIA Tegra 3 in 2012

NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 chipset showed up in many early dual-core smartphones in 2011, and were the SoC of choice for the Android tablet market for almost the entire year. Yet the Tegra 2 was largely abandoned in smartphones by the end of the year, as dual-core chips from Texas Instruments and Samsung dominated later smartphone releases. And NVIDIA’s standing in the Android tablet market didn’t help it as much as anticipated, as Honeycomb tablets failed to gain significant traction, and the bestselling non-iPad tablet – the Amazon Kindle Fire – chose TI’s OMAP CPU over Tegra 2.

With Intel getting its first mobile chips ready to ship, has NVIDIA’s star fallen already? Not true, says FBR Capital analyst Craig Berger, who noted that NVIDIA’s new Tegra 3 SoC is making strategic “design wins” with mobile manufacturers. Tablets from Asus, Lenovo, ZTE, and Acer either have or will soon be shipping with the Tegra 3, according to Berger.

Berger also noted that he expects the Tegra 3 to power several upcoming Android handsets, including the HTC EDGE and the LG X3. If NVIDIA’s chips can deliver their quad-core number crunching with improved power-usage, these mobile devices will surely show that off to great effect, and consumers (and OEMs) will clamor for more Tegra 3 devices.

One major "design loss" for NVIDIA is Amazon's upcoming tablet, which Berger states will use a TI OMAP chip, the same company Amazon chose for the initial Fire. But Berger remains confident in NVIDIA’s lineup and has increased his stock target to $20 a share, up from $17. We’re not sure how many of you are looking for stock tips, but we imagine a great many of you are looking forward to the expanded quad-core future for mobile devices this year.

source: Forbes