Nvidia CEO: We have a CPU strategy

CNET ^ | August 12, 2010 9:54 PM PDT | Brooke Crothers

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Nvidia's chief executive officer is emphatic that his company has a strategy for building processors beyond its mainstay graphics chips.

During an interview with CNET, Jen-Hsun Huang addressed a longstanding issue with the company's chips that has become a financial bruden, as well as speaking about ongoing Intel litigation and the resolution of its graphics chip defect issue.

Chief executive of Nvidia, Jen-Hsun Huang

On Thursday, Nvidia reported a second-quarter net loss of $141 million, or 25 cents per share, worse than the net loss of $105.3 million, or 19 cents a share, a year earlier. The graphics processing unit (GPU) supplier--whose chips are found in PCs from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer, Sony, and Toshiba--cited muted demand for consumer graphics chips and economic weakness in Europe and China, which drove consumers to lower-priced products. Nvidia products typically are targeted at the upper end of the market.

In the earnings announcement, the company addressed a longstanding issue--and ongoing financial burden--centered on a defect in some of its earlier GPUs and chipsets. The problem was first cited by Nvidia in July 2008 when it announced a charge ranging from $150 million to $200 million to cover costs to repair and replace GPUs and chipsets due to "weak die/packaging material" in older laptop products. "Die/packaging" essentially describes the chip. Nvidia also announced additional charges after July 2008.

On Thursday, Nvidia said it recorded an "additional net charge" of $193.9 million related to the same problem.

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ARM processors and Tegra....strategy news....and tablets....with Android.

[puppypusher]

I have a Dell 1710XPS notebook that's about four years old that's designed for high performance gaming and it uses one of Nvidia’s graphics chips.

That notebook has had to be repaired twice because the graphics processor overheats.To this day it still does.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

That is likely a harbinger of the problem nvidia had with their chips....

Somewhere I have read some of the gorry details on the trouble details....might have been on Anandtech.

[CodeToad]

I was always a nVidia geek but turned to ATI when I bought one of their 5770 graphics boards that does a great job with very low heat at a good price.

[WalterSobchak2012]

Getting deep into the ARM world now is a fit of insanity and Tegra doesn’t exactly have an abundance of high-volume design wins.

The problem with the ARM world is the only chips that are particularly profitable is cellular and Qualcomm, Infineon and Texas Instruments have that market sewn up.

Outside of mobile chipsets ARM has licensed their cores to everybody under the sun, including a large number of Chinese chipmakers who are pumping out chips suitable for 99% of embedded applications at virtually no cost while companies like Apple are perusing a custom silicon strategy for their ARM devices.

Even when it comes to graphics, PowerVR has become the defacto standard for graphics married to ARM devices, which like ARM itself available to any chipmaker and at very low cost. PowerVR is no slouch - look at the gaming experience on the iPhone and iPad. There really isn’t a place for nvidia here.