Getting back to design wins, Nvidia is playing this card very cynically, so cynically that it can’t be by chance. If you are not versed in the process of hardware development, you might think that a design win means that there will be, or at least there is a high likleyhood, of a product that ships with the claimed chip inside.
In the PC world, this is exactly the case. When Nvidia says it has X design wins for its GPUs in PCs, you can expect the number of PC models with those GPUs to be fairly close to X. If the hardware that Nvidia gave to the PC maker for evaluation diverges from production silicon six months later, that is usually not a problem. A PC will easily tolerate 5W more power use or a few percent less GPU performance. Not a big deal. If things go really wrong, putting a different PCIe graphics card in it’s place is a trivial task.
The mobile space is a different kettle of artfully packaged toxic substances however. Any handset, laptop, widget or device is designed around the CPU or SoC. Even though they are all ARM cored, you can’t swap out a Snapdragon for a Tegra or an OMAP. The thermals, electrical connections, and everything else are so different that it necessitates a new design for a new CPU. On top of that, specifications are enforced with a military zeal, no divergence is tolerated.
Silicon delivery schedules for most chips in this space tend to be hit and miss. Some companies hit schedules on the nose, others don’t. Some deliver the promised specifications, others don’t. Performance is the same, you get what you get, and vendor reliability might vary widely. Trust but verify is the name of the widget game.
