But Huang didn’t have the same enthusiasm for smartphones, reflecting the fact that Nvidia has had trouble penetrating that potentially lucrative market despite the attractiveness of the Tegra line. Why? Nvidia offers the two major silicon components necessary to power any smartphone. It has the quad-core Tegra 3 processor itself — which has made it into a handful of high-end smartphones like the HTC One X – and thanks to its acquisition of Icera in 2011, it has the radio modem necessary to connect the phone to the network.

But what Nvidia doesn’t have is an integrated applications processor and modem, which Huang readily admitted is its key impediment. Here’s an excerpt from Huang’s comments at Nvidia’s earnings call (you can read the full transcript at Seeking Alpha):

“There is no standalone modem business anymore and in many of these new 4G connected device marketplace, an integrated approach is necessary and that’s the reason why we bought Icera and that’s the reason why we’re investing in LTE.

“… with an LTE modem, the Tegra processor and our software capability, we will be able to address a much larger phone opportunity going forward. And so we’ll have some phone success this year, but we’re not expecting to have a whole lot of phone design wins until we engage the market with LTE.”

There are a lot of reasons why phone makers prefer integrated designs. Fewer components mean fewer suppliers and fewer parts to cram into the limited space of a smartphone. Fewer components mean less complexity in design and ultimately a lower cost to manufacture. But one of the biggest reasons 4G smartphone makers have become so keen on integrated chips is because they drain less power than a split-silicon solution. By sharing the same chipset and reducing the overall number of circuits, the design takes much less of a toll on the battery.

That’s a big concern for smartphone makers as the first generation of LTE handsets proved to be battery killers. Last year before Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm SVP of Product Management Raj Talluri predicted that the power-saving benefits of Qualcomm’s then-new integrated Snapdragon S4 processors would give it a tremendous advantage in the LTE smartphone market. So far his prediction has proven true. Qualcomm has dominated the market.

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Qualcomm’s 8960 chipset, a dual-core Snapdragon processor with an integrated LTE chipset, will debut in multiple phones at MWC, Talluri said. That tight integration not only allows the radio and apps processor to share resources, cutting down on battery drain, but the silicon will be Qualcomm’s first 28-nanometer chip, making it one of the most power-efficient processors on the market, Talluri said.

“All of the LTE devices out there today use separate modems and use separate radios,” Talluri said. “With integrated LTE we’ll see significant improvements in power efficiency.”

Separate radios and processors aren’t the only causes of LTE’s notorious battery life problems. As I wrote last week, multiple antennas, multiple radio networks and the lack of LTE cell density are big contributing factors, but tighter integration with the processor and more efficient silicon design will go a long way to fix the problem.

A quad-core LTE smartphone might actually be a mixed blessing. All of the current quad-core designs out there — Qualcomm’s included — are standalone processors, meaning any device using them will compound its already poor power performance with a more powerful energy-sucking multimedia chip.

Qualcomm hopes it can offset the problem with its unique processor design. Unlike its competitors, Qualcomm’s four cores can run asynchronously, meaning each CPU doesn’t need to ramp up to its full clock speed when activated, Talluri said. By only partially activating each core, Snapdragon’s can incrementally scale their compute power, and thus their power consumption, he said.

Qualcomm may yet surprise us with a device, though, Talluri added. The chipmaker is still debating whether to demo at the show concept phones embedded with its quad-core 8064 Snapdragon, and while that silicon won’t be shipping in commercial handsets and tablets until the fall, some of Qualcomm’s customers may show off prototype devices of their own.

Qualcomm may sit this round out, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see other vendors tackle the quad-core phone at MWC. All eyes have turned to Nvidia, which is almost certainly going to stick its Tegra 3 processor in some vendor’s handheld device at the show.  As my colleague Kevin Tofel wrote, few smartphone apps are designed to take advantage of a quad-core configuration, so we might wind up with quad-core devices with a lot of horsepower but with nowhere to go.

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The good news is that handset makers and network vendors are doing plenty to boost the power efficiency of LTE devices, but the bad news is that as 4G technologies evolve, making our phone and tablet connections even faster, their radios will continue to voraciously eat up batteries. The question is can the former trend keep up with the latter.

Why your next LTE phone will be better

The first generation of LTE devices are unquestionable the most sophisticated smartphones and tablets we’ve seen to date in terms of processing power, screen-resolution and OS software. But the approach most vendors were forced to take to the radio was hardly delicate. In most cases an LTE chip was shoehorned into the device, which is hardly a formula for long battery life.

There’s a lot of work that silicon vendors are doing to squeeze better power performance out of those phones. Components that are today separated in the bowels of the phone such as the applications processor and baseband will be combined, allowing them to share power resources. The world’s largest radio chip vendor Qualcomm has released its first integrated Snapdragon processor and LTE radio modem, and according to Qualcomm product management VP Raj Talluri, we’ll see many devices supporting that next-gen chip at Mobile World Congress next week.

Texas Instruments is developing radio chips that require the device to lean less and less on a smartphone’s powerful applications processor to perform basic tasks, such as initiate NFC payments or perform quick GPS-location checks. The longer the apps processor remains dormant the less drain the phone will have on the battery.

Optimizing the network will also be a big source of power savings. As operators move their voice services onto LTE and build out both the coverage and density of their networks, they can offer LTE-only phones (Verizon is targeting its first such device for 2013). The fewer active radios there are sucking at the battery, the longer our phones will sustain charges.

As operators build denser networks, shrinking the size of LTE cells, phones won’t have to boost their transmit power as much to link to the tower. And as coverage improves, phones will stay within LTE’s warm embrace for longer intervals, eliminating the need to constantly negotiate between an operator’s multiple networks.

The tug-of-war in the handset

The big question is whether all of those tweaks and technologies will be enough. Power drain will be an ongoing problem for handset designers and their efforts are complicated by the fact that radios are becoming fundamentally less power efficient even as they become more bandwidth efficient. ABI Research analyst Jim Mielke summed up this way: “The bottom line is the higher the data rate and higher spectral efficiency, the higher the computing requirements — and thus power drain.”

That means future technologies like LTE-Advanced, which promises speeds as high 1 Gbps, will be ravenously hungry for power. Older generation technologies won’t be immune either. As T-Mobile moves to 84 Mbps HSPA+, it will add dual antennas to its devices, which suck down power just like their LTE brethren.

Mielke said some of that power drain is offset by the simple efficiency of its ultra-fast LTE modem  — the faster a device can download a video or file, the sooner it can shut down the data session and de-activate the radio. Theoretically faster download speeds and the LTE radio’s inherent power inefficiency should cancel each other out, but that’s assuming that consumers use LTE phones the same way they use 3G ones. It’s no coincidence that the newest smartphones don’t just have 4G radios, but also larger higher-definition screens and multi-core processors. LTE’s speeds allow the mobile public to do so much more with their handsets, and the tendency is take advantage of that raw power to stream more video, surf more Web pages and download more files – that is until data caps kick in.

Vendors like Motorola are combating the problem by sacrificing design for fatter batteries, as it did with the new Razr Maxx. The short term solution is for device makers to devote more device cost and space to the phone’s lithium-ion footprint. But ultimately battery technology is going to have to improve if the handset industry is going to keep up with advancements in radio technology.

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