Nvidia: Our strategy is coming into its own

Nvidia is expecting strong growth in the next year, pointing to its new Tegra 3 platform as it insists that its strategy is coming into its own.

The chip giant believes that our increased focus on not just mobile but also on what we expect from graphics is behind a modest rise in revenue in its latest financial results, with brighter times ahead.

"Nvidia's strategy is coming into its own, as the world becomes increasingly visual and mobile," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive of Nvidia.

Accelerated

"Our GPU business accelerated in the third quarter, driven by strong demand from gamers and the professional market. And our mobile business benefited from new devices coming onto the market," he added.

"With Tegra 3 phone wins well ahead of Tegra 2's pace, we're expecting strong growth in the year ahead."

The company recorded a 4.9 per cent increase in revenue to $1.07 billion (c£672m) over the last quarter and a 26.3 per cent rise year on year.

Nvidia took the opportunity to reflect on some of its recent announcements as it looks ahead – including the launch of Tegra 3 in the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, the addition of three more Tegra phones, 13 more Tegra-toting tablets (which takes the total to 23) and the news that the Titan supercomputer will use 18,000 Tesla processors.

]]>

Nvidia: Second wave of Android tablets a vast improvement

Nvidia is doing relatively well in the tablet space, with its Tegra 2 SoC being the core piece of silicon inside Honeycomb tablets like the Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. But Android was off to a slow start in this market compared to the hot-selling iPad. The platform's lack of 'killer' apps and unpolished software has been mentioned before as key weaknesses, but Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says this is just part of the problem.

"It's a point of sales problem. It's an expertise at retail problem. It's a marketing problem to consumers. It is a price point problem," he said in a recent chat with Cnet. Although Huang didn't mention any specific products, he clearly had Apple and the iPad in mind. Not only did the company have the lowest priced device in the market when it launched the first two iterations of the iPad, they also had a solid advantage when it came to distribution and marketing.

Having their own stores allows them to explain its product better to consumers through dedicated sales people, and it also means they can capture bigger margins than competitors who share a cut on each sale with retail partners.

The fact that tablets were initially selling with a smartphone OS was also a big issue, though Honeycomb has taken care of that for the most part. Lastly, Huang mentioned that tablets should be offered in a base WiFi-only configuration from day one, rather than launching with the 3G versions for the sake of packing more features and holding off the more affordable variants for later -- much like Motorola did with its heavily hyped Xoom.

Nvidia's chief executive believes the second round of Android tablets are far better than the first generation of devices, though, and while there are still issues that need to be dealt with we are already seeing the first devices that meaningfully undercut Apple's $499 price for the iPad 2 without sacrificing functionality. The Acer Iconia and Asus Transformer are two examples of that, and we're definitely interested to see what's next.