backtop

Hardware NVIDIA Sees Red During Fiscal Q2 2009
Jason Mick (Blog) - August 13, 2008 12:25 PM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 51 comment(s) - last by Chocobollz.. on Aug 14 at 2:48 PM
Chipmaker struggles with a net loss and being in the unfamiliar role of underdog

NVIDIA posted a troubled financial outlook for its fiscal Q2 2009, ending in July.  Now with the final numbers coming in, it is apparent that the company is bleeding money and facing the unfamiliar role of playing underdog to competitor AMD/ATI. 

Compounding NVIDIA's woes was the revelation that nearly all its laptop GPUs were defective.  Faced with a $196M USD charge to cover the replacement costs for GPUs and slowed sales, NVIDIA has announced for the first time in many quarters that it is in the red.

Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA stated, "Our Q2 financial performance was disappointing. The desktop PC market around the world weakened during the quarter. And our miscalculation of competitive price position further pressured our desktop GPU business. We have a great product line-up and, having taken the necessary pricing actions, we are strongly positioned again. Our focus now is to drive cost improvements and to further enhance our competitiveness through the many exciting initiatives we have planned for the rest of the year."

In total, revenue for the quarter dropped to $892.7M USD, down from $935.3M USD a year prior.  Following the U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP); NVIDIA announced that it was in the red with a loss of $120.9M USD for the quarter.

Mr. Huang did not address the laptop problems in the earnings report.  Rather, he plugged the strong growth of the notebook GPU sales. 

While he acknowledged that NVIDIA may be in a bit of trouble, Mr. Huang expressed confidence that key NVIDIA technologies will help the company through.  Among these are PhysX support and CUDA -- a C language programming interface.  He added, "Though we approach the near term with caution, we remain very optimistic about the expanding universe of visual computing and the exciting growth opportunities made possible by CUDA, our general purpose parallel computing architecture."

NVIDIA does have a bit of additional cause for concern, however.  Long-time AMD rival Intel is jumping into the discrete graphics business.  NVIDIA is quite concerned about Intel’s Larrabee architecture and how the press interprets its significance – NVIDIA has even reached out to the press to shoot down “myths” surrounding Larrabee.

Comments     Threshold


This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled
Text Pop-up Ads
By glitchc on 8/13/2008 1:56:04 PM , Rating: 5
Since when did DT start posting articles with text pop-up ads?

quote:
Our Q2 financial performance was disappointing


quote:
U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP);


They're exceptionally annoying! They pop up while one is scrolling down to read the rest of the article and subsequent comments. Why is a high calibre news source such as DT sinking to this level?




RE: Text Pop-up Ads
By HeelyJoe on 8/13/08, Rating: 0
RE: Text Pop-up Ads
By BruceLeet on 8/13/2008 6:15:29 PM , Rating: 2
Someone complained about this the other day, and then someone replied

"firefox+adblock+ my friend"

Its useful cause its true.

The other day I couldnt review a benchmarking site because one of the sites wouldnt let me view their site unless I disabled Adblock, which is their only revenue I guess.

http://www.tweaktown.com/supportus.html


RE: Text Pop-up Ads
By Klober on 8/13/2008 7:21:47 PM , Rating: 1
Or, instead of switching browsers (or in the case you can't switch) you could always be a techie and troubleshoot how to turn them off. I believe it takes a total of 3 clicks. It took me maybe 60 seconds. And this solution is browser agnostic.


RE: Text Pop-up Ads
By BruceLeet on 8/14/2008 12:22:13 AM , Rating: 2
3 clicks in 60 seconds, yeah thats Internet Explorer alright.


RE: Text Pop-up Ads
By abhaxus on 8/14/2008 1:18:27 AM , Rating: 1
more like about 30 seconds to figure out where you go to turn them off and another click to turn them off when you get there :)


RE: Text Pop-up Ads
By Klober on 8/14/2008 12:56:27 PM , Rating: 2
Exactly. And doing it that way you'll never see them again on the site from which you disabled them (unless you clear your cookies or something equivalent). This works for almost all the pop-up text ads I've found on sites.

BTW, how does giving people an alternative to switching browsers equate to down-rating? Finicky crowd here...


RE: Text Pop-up Ads
By NullSubroutine on 8/14/2008 5:50:45 AM , Rating: 3
Disable javascript when you go there, then reenable when you leave.


RE: Text Pop-up Ads
By Chocobollz on 8/14/2008 12:48:11 PM , Rating: 2
Ok, the answer is actually very simple.

1) You use FF or IE (I assume) AND you have problems
2) I use Opera 9.51 AND I don't have problems

You see any correlations between them? :)

You know what you have to do now, right? :)


RE: Text Pop-up Ads
By Klober on 8/14/2008 1:00:47 PM , Rating: 2
A) The browser itself is not the issue.
B) Some people don't have the option of using a different browser.

Just disable the ads themselves. Easiest/quickest way. I use IE at work because I have no choice, otherwise I use Maxthon. True, Maxthon doesn't give me any issues, but while I'd love to use it everywhere it's just not an option at work. So I did the techie thing and troubleshot the issue and figured out that you can disable the ads through the ads themselves. Considering the site we're frequenting I'm surprised more people haven't done this! :P


RE: Text Pop-up Ads
By Chocobollz on 8/14/2008 2:48:03 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
(...) and figured out that you can disable the ads through the ads themselves.

Oh LOL? I haven't know that.

quote:
A) The browser itself is not the issue.

Really? And why I haven't see any ads here? I thought it was my browser.. Ok, lemme check by opening this page from IE..

A few minutes later..

Ok, I've tested it with IE and oh well, there's no ads too there, so I guess it wasn't the browser afterall.. maybe my firewall who did it.. LOL (I'm using Agnitum Outpost Firewall Pro 3.51 here)

EDIT!!

Oh! There's 1 text-ads here in IE. The ads is at the "Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA stated, (...)" (the "CEO" word was highlighted in green color and when I hover the mouse-cursor on it, there's an ads popped up). So apparently, it was Opera which is doing its job right! Oh I love this browser! LOL Opera FTW! :)


Can of Whoop-ass
By pauldovi on 8/13/2008 1:05:20 PM , Rating: 5
Apparently Can's of Whoop-ass cost a lot!




RE: Can of Whoop-ass
By Bender 123 on 8/13/2008 1:44:57 PM , Rating: 5
Whoop-ass is cheap...Its the "Whoooops-ass" that costs alot.


RE: Can of Whoop-ass
By sgtdisturbed47 on 8/13/2008 2:12:15 PM , Rating: 1
I'm not too concerned. Many companies are struggling right now due to the crappy economy. Give it time and they will bounce back. They always do.


RE: Can of Whoop-ass
By gunzac21 on 8/13/2008 11:24:14 PM , Rating: 2
I have something I want to sell you.


RE: Can of Whoop-ass
By Ringold on 8/14/2008 5:15:58 AM , Rating: 2
Lets not use the struggling economy excuse; it never stops the top-performers from continuing to perform. Intel's not bleeding money, nor is Apple, RIM, Cisco, etc.

I wont say the economy doesn't have an impact, I'm saying it separates the men from the boys, so to speak.


RE: Can of Whoop-ass
By therealnickdanger on 8/14/2008 7:49:37 AM , Rating: 2
Don't confuse a poor product with a bad economy.


NV needs to get into the CPU biz
By phatboye on 8/13/2008 2:05:35 PM , Rating: 2
I predicted hard times for NV ever since both Intel and AMD decided to get more involved in discrete graphic processing units. And even though NV has has been on a roll for the past few years I always wondered how long that would last. NV can keep making claims that their products will make CPUs irrelevant all they want but the reality is that will never happen. My hope is that Nvidia and via could become stronger partners and create a platform that rival similar offerings from Intel and AMD. Nvidia needs a partner in the CPU business in order to survive and right now it looks like both Intel and AMD are more concerned with pushing their own GPUs and chipsets than having to deal with NVidia.




RE: NV needs to get into the CPU biz
By StevoLincolnite on 8/13/2008 2:30:15 PM , Rating: 1
Does anyone know what Team did the GT200 series?
Because it honestly feels like the 3dfx Team did the GT200 series much like they did with the Geforce FX series, for some reason the GPU's just don't seem to be what they "Should" be throwing out performance wise.

I would love for a company like Via to Purchase nVidia and start rolling out complete platforms at a competitive price, for instance Having a GPU+CPU on the same PCI-E or AGP Card would be awesome as an "Upgrade" to some older systems which are socket limited.


RE: NV needs to get into the CPU biz
By Targon on 8/14/2008 10:46:12 AM , Rating: 2
The problem with this idea is that the PCI, AGP, and even PCI Express bus just wouldn't be a good place for a CPU to go due to bandwidth limitations. AMD had a solution for this with a slot for HyperTransport connectivity(HTX as I recall), but it never took off.

The idea of a slot for "future CPU upgrades" goes WAY WAY WAY back to the days of the 286. A company called ALR(Advanced Logic Research) put a slot in some of their 80286 based systems that would allow for an 80386sx daughter card. The bus may have been 16 bit, but the daughter card could handle 32 bit instructions.

Cost becomes the true issue, because end users do NOT do their own upgrades, so pay for the labor in addition to parts. Motherboard+CPU+labor to upgrade an old computer(including dealing with the OS related issues) may cost more than $400. At that point, why not just replace the whole computer, which would take less time and effort.


By Chocobollz on 8/14/2008 12:58:58 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
I would love for a company like Via to Purchase nVidia (...)

Don't you have it backwards? :)