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.

Yearly global smartphone sales are around 300 million.

... 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.

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

Yeah, peak sales per year were a few years back. People are definitely keeping them longer than they used to.

I thought those came from the automotive sector.

Nah, they also managed to fob them off on the auto sector to some extent, but they were originally envisaged as a mobile chip.