>In particular, see their attempts to break into mobile chip land;

I wouldn't exactly say it was a failure, all those chips ended up being used in the Nintendo Switch

If you are aiming to have your chips in a decent portion of all mid/high-end phones sold, which they appear to have been aiming for, then the Nintendo Switch isn't really that much of a consolation prize. The Switch had very high sales... for a console, with 150 million over 7 years. Smartphone sales peaked at 1.5 billion units a year. You'd probably prefer to be Qualcomm than Nvidia in this particular market segment, all things considered.

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oblio 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yearly global smartphone sales are around 300 million.

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rsynnott 4 days ago | parent [-]

... Where are you getting that? The iPhone _alone_ sells about 200 million units a year.

There are almost 5 billion smartphone users; sales of 300 million a year would imply that those are only replaced every 16 years, which is obviously absurd.

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oblio 3 days ago | parent [-]

Oh, that was quarterly: https://canalys.com/newsroom/global-smartphone-market-q2-202...

On a separate note, speaking of the average lifespan of a phone, I'm fairly sure that with how expensive they're becoming, smartphone lifespans are increasing. Especially with:

* hardware performance largely plateauing (not in the absolute sense, that of "this phone can do most of what I need")

* the EU pushing for easy battery and screen replacement and also for 7 years of OS updates

* the vast majority of phones having cases to protect against physical damage

	▲	rsynnott 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, peak sales per year were a few years back. People are definitely keeping them longer than they used to.

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xgkickt 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I thought those came from the automotive sector.

	▲	rsynnott 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nah, they also managed to fob them off on the auto sector to some extent, but they were originally envisaged as a mobile chip.