SAN JOSE, Calif. – Apple dominated the market for applications processors in tablets last year with Texas Instruments and Nvidia in a near tie for second place, according to a new
market research report from Strategy Analytics. The report was released the same day Apple is rolling out its next generation iPad in San Francisco, a device expected to sport an upgraded CPU, display and cellular modem.
The still-young market for apps processors in tablets expanded by a whopping 230 percent in 2011 with Apple commanding 59 percent of the sockets with its A-series chip in the iPad, the report said. But the non-Apple part of the tablet market is growing even faster than Apple’s share, it added.
TI’s Omap chips captured 35 percent of the non-iPad tablet market buoyed by design wins in the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook. Nvidia’s Tegra came in a close second at 34 percent claiming sockets in tablets from Acer, Asus, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and others.
Qualcomm and Intel, giants in smartphones and PCs respectively, “missed the boat” in tablets in 2011, said Sravan Kundojjala, a senior analyst for handset component technologies at Strategy Analytics in a press statement.
Likewise apps processor vendors Broadcom, ST-Ericsson, MediaTek, Marvell and Renesas “need to improve their tablet market focus in 2012 as these companies haven’t scored significant tablet design-wins so far,” he said.
“We believe that Qualcomm is well-positioned to capture meaningful share in LTE tablets and Windows 8 tablets in 2012,” Kundojjala said. In addition, “Nvidia is well positioned to capture further share in tablets with its quad-core Tegra 3 processor in 2012,” he added.
A whopping 98 percent of the mobile apps processors used in 2011 were ARM-based chips, the report estimates. However, Strategy Analytics said it expects x86-based chips from Intel and AMD to eke out a slice of the market in 2012 for tablets based on Android 4.0 and Windows 8.
“With Apple expected to announce its iPad 3 product today, the tablet market is poised for accelerated growth in the coming quarters,” Kundojjala said. “We expect strong efforts from Amazon, Google and Microsoft will serve as key catalysts for the non-Apple tablet vendors in 2012,” he added.
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