The strokers of beards and naysayers on Wall Street are getting a bit worried about what is coming out of the halls of the Green Goblin King.
Lately there has been lots of mutterings about delayed products, a bad dice roll on the mobile market and the odd court case. All of this is sending Nvidia's stock into free fall.
Stock prices have fallen 44 percent this year which, to put it in perspective, is worse than BP managed to do by creating the worst man-made disaster in history.
While Wall Street has been muttering against him, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has been a merry old soul. He says his graphics chips are on the rise and the "vast majority of the world" recognises Nvidia as a "world leader in visual computing."
While talking up your product is good PR, in the face of falling shareprices, investors are going to be worried that Huang is more in denial than the temple of Isis at Philae.
This should have been a good year . Out of the court of the Green King stomped Fermi, which promised game designers more processing power. The only problem was that the $200 chip is six months late. If it had turned up on time then it might have made more of an impact. Now Nvidia has to hope that the chip was ahead of its time enough to save it.
But other problems troubled the court too. The relationship with Intel broke down in February. The chipmaker decided to give up on licensing the Green Goblins chipsets which effectively locked it out of the market.
Nvidia sued Intel for breach of contract in March 2009 and decided to pull out of the chipset business.
So this limited Nvidia's future to the mobile phones and supercomputers market. All potentially good, but there is some tough competition.
Nvidia banked its farm on its Tegra chip being the new brain of smartphones. In doing so its main Opposition was the natty Snapdragon chip from Qualcomm's and Texas Instruments OMAP.
While the rivals picked up the success stories of the smartphone business, Nvidia's claim to fame was to nail its colours to Microsoft's Zune and 'Kin. The 'kin was such a spectacular failure that it might have even spoiled Nvidia's chance to sell to other manufacturers.
Word on the street is that Tegra will find its way into the more popular Android phones but Nvidia spent a fortune fine-tuning Tegra chips so they work with Windows. If Windows 7 Mobile takes off then it might make some of this back, but it seems that Nvidia missed making a fast buck off of Android adoption.
It has had more luck with getting its Tesla chip under the bonnet of supercomputers. The Nebulae, a supercomputer in China powered by Tesla, was ranked the second-fastest machine in the world.
But the problem is that the supercomputer world is largely dominated by IBM and HP. Nvidia will have its work cut out for it trying to get acceptance in what is a closed club.
Ironically the cards based on the Fermi chip are not that bad and are starting to get attention amongst the gaming community. Unfortunately, although Nvidia needs these guys, it is the sort of business it needed to move beyond if it was going to have any sizeable impact on the world.
Wall Street is going to be less impressed with high sales in the gaming community than it is to see Nvidia in the heart of a new generation of smart phones. What is dangerous for Nvidia, if the share prices keep falling like this, it is going to see its kingdom shrink to a niche provider of high performance game gear.
Yep, most of the people in the world, starving, will agree to that just to get the sandwich being held out by the nVidia PR monkey.
nVidia PR monkey (while holding sandwich out to starving person): "Do you agree with the statement: 'nVidia is the world leader in visual computing?'"
Starving person: "Whatever you say, just give me the sandwich, please!"
'cause that's about the ONLY way nVidia could get ANYONE to agree with that complete lie.
nVidia is a world leader, alright, in corporate PR bullsh(t!
Can't wait to see JHH sweeping the floor at the local MickeyD!
Not that bad, now there's a glowing endorsement. Actually, Fermi is a completed f**ked up architecture, coupled with a design that completely ignored basic issues with TSMC's 40nm process. The resultant chip can, in any honesty, be only referred to as a 'complete clusterf**k'.
The only attention Fermi has been getting from anybody with any credibility is derisional laughter.
You are right about one thing, nVidia does face an uphill battle with getting market share in supercomputer industry. Uphill as in a sheer vertical 30,000 foot cliff. With no handholds. And a surface like teflon-lined glass.
The only reason the Chinese are using Fermi for their supercomputer is that 1) nVidia probably completely misrepresented their chips, and 2) nVidia most likely GAVE them to the Chinese only so nVidia could claim ANYBODY was using them.
I guess you guys missed the story about Oak Ridge National Lab tentatively agreeing to use Fermi for a supercomputer, then tossing nVidia out the door when Fermi turned out to be an underperforming hog with a power appetite approaching nuclear power plant levels and a heat generation rate approaching a good sized star.
It's they have a "Whirled Leader in Visual Computing."
It's dizzying.
If you are simply spouting at the mouth because you are emotionally attached to the 5770 ATi duped you into buying, that's expected. You bought an ATi card, so therefore you are not terribly smart.
But if you are an investor, then I worry about your portfolio. I hate Apple products, I hate Apple users, and I hate Steve Jobs. But I leave that in the pile of useless feelings when I make investment decisions. And that's because I'm one person with a worthless opinion that is not mirrored by the vast majority of the market.
Indeed I'm an educated consumer, I've been gaming for (hem), 30 odd years. During that time I've owned numerous ATI and nvidia cards and honestly, I've just been waiting for the right price point to upgrade to Fermi.
Here's why. Ati have always left me hung out to dry with customer support, and driver support. I'm not going to build a new machine without CUDA support. Now I hear you all nay saying the fact that Cuda is for scientific types who model and orchistrate stock market crashes, but actually there are a raft of consumer applications that are starting to exploit the technology. Unfortunatly for ATI they don't have that traction with what ever it is they call their equivalent.
Add to all that, the finances of ATI are hanging on for grim death with regular share dilution, new debt, and if it wasn't for Intel throwing them a $1.3 billion bone they'd be in serious financial trouble now. So I can see the research budgets on two lines of products getting pared thinner and thinner.
On the other hand Nvidia has pots of cash and is hugely cash generative, in fact they have an extensive share buy back program. On top they only have visual computing to focus on, and not tit for tat battles with intel on the x86 architecture which would have been assiged to the dumpster in the 80s if it wasn't for Microsoft.
ATI is a mess, but wall street loves them at the moment, go figure.
...Awaiting incoming ATI fan boy bile...