Last night NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, stated that shipments of its Tegra 4 SoC to customers would begin in Q2. A few outlets incorrectly assumed this meant Q2 of NVIDIA's fiscal year, but I just confirmed with NVIDIA that Jen-Hsun was referring to calendar Q2 - in other words, the period of time between April and June 2013.

Jen-Hsun also confirmed what was announced at CES: Shield, the handheld Android gaming device (with PC streaming capabilities) based on Tegra 4, would also ship in Q2. Jen-Hsun did add that Shield will show up in the latter part of Q2, which likely points to a late May/June launch.

In short, there's no new news here. NVIDIA mentioned Q2 as the release timeframe for Shield at its press event at CES last month. Obviously Shield can't launch without Tegra 4, so it's safe to say that Tegra 4 will also be shipping in Q2. With customer shipments happening in Q2, I'd expect products (other than Shield) in late Q2 or early Q3.

The rest of the earnings call was pretty interesting. GPU revenues are still solid despite maturing processor graphics solutions (although growing slowly), and Tegra revenue was up 50% over the previous year thanks to the success of Tegra 3. NVIDIA is still struggling on the smartphone side, but tablets have been a huge part of the success of the Tegra business unit.