The glorious Nvidia empire upon which the sun appears to be setting a lot lately, has been spilling the beans of its cunning plan for the future which seems to be betting the farm on technology that few seem to want.
Dear Leader Jen-Hsun Huang told Cnet that he wants to get into the CPU business as part of a plan to compete better against AMD with ATI in-house, as well as Intel.
Of course this means that Nvidia would require an x86 license and Intel is unlikely to want to give Jen-Hsun one so it is stuck with Tegra which is an ARM CPU paired to Nvidia's GPU technology.
Now that Intel has killed off Nvidia's chipset business, the fact is Tegra is all Nvidia has.
So last Thursday when Nvidia reported a second-quarter net loss of $141 million Jen-Hsun indicated that he is basically leaning on Tegra to pull the company's nadgers out of the fire.
So will Tegra do anything to help? Tegra 2 is targeted at smartphones and tablets but its problem is that no one has signed up for it.
Huang insists that dual-core Tegra 2 chip, the AP20 for smartphones and the T20 for tablets, will be making an appearance. However, few suppliers appear to be keen to get a product to market.
One of the strange things that he has not done is look at what the market is doing. Nvidia has been typically targeting the top end of the market and has not really been working with the only player to make cash in that market, Apple.
Instead its main customers are the likes of HP and Dell and Apple who have seen cash strapped punters in Europe and China move lower-priced products. Places where Nvidia could have, but never went. It is starting to look that if something is not done, Nvidia.....
ARM when compared to an x86 architecture is much more efficient as it has single length instructions, with jump on result and has the benefit of not having to support the huge legacy code base from i386 onwards. It is the best choice for many applications and is developing fast to higher specifications at extremely low power, not a case of being stuck with it...
Secondly Nvidia would have posted a profit this quarter if it did not have to set aside $190 million in costs for the 2008 hardware chip failures and settlement.
Nick, 8 + 7 is 15. When are we going to stop with the addition lessons and begin subtraction?
The set-aside for 'bumpgate' is a reminder of how clueless JHH and his mindless minions are with technical issues, which is strange for a company supposedly competing in the computer hardware industry. Might explain why their chipset business is dead, their [GP]GPU business is falling apart and the only thing JHH wants to talk about is a tiny chip for tiny applications that nobody has yet used, and is unlikely to use.
NVidia made it's name with TWISBP, since if you want to watch either DVD or Bluray quality videos, it doesn't really matter whose technology you want to use. That means they have to get their GPU into a machine that can perform at that level, which at the moment is limited to AMD and Intel.
While ARM is more efficient and perfect for battery using portable devices, they currently lack the horse power to run the games that would require a mid-tier GPU that nVidia sells, and MS hasn't ported Windows, yet.
Why don't you head back to SemiAccurate and exchange ideas with those friendly fellas over there.
As for all that you say, well I don't see a lot of unbiased objectivity in your posts.
What is Hector de Jesus Ruiz doing these days?
In this episode, Sancho, we see the flailings of a knight errant who is blind to the perpetual motion of the bus type interface across the faces of those who nsist on being the very green, or some diversified on-chip hybrid.