Nvidia gives details on its strategy

Michael Hara, vice-president of Investor Relations, and Daniel Vivoli, senior vice-president of Marketing, gave some interesting information last week at the JP Morgan Technology Conference.

For the first time, a clear explanation was provided on G92 yields which were said to be lower than expected. According to M. Hara, it involves more of a problem related to an overly strict validation procedure than a production one. The transition to the G92b, which should be engraved in 55nm, will help to resolve these difficulties. Moreover, the G92’s product life has been prolonged for a period “from 6-8 to 12 months”. According to these Nvidia employees, everything that will be announced in the next 3-4 months will be more powerful. This should indeed be the case as there are few differences in terms of functions and the G92(b) can easily be placed in a lower position for some time while waiting for the arrival of a “tailored” mid-level card (if there is a need for one).

There is some optimism concerning the Tesla line which involves the calculation power market. However, the current market isn’t really the target. It’s true that decreasing the relative importance of the CPU will take some time but certain areas such as "personal" supercalculators for researchers look promising.

In terms of chipsets, the objective of a 25% market share (on the part where Nvidia can be present) on the Intel platform is still relevant. Nvidia will not attack the "ultra-low-end" segment where quality and brand name aren’t a factor which implies that costs are the most important when competing in this domain. It’s clear that they want to attain 15% to 20% of market shares on this platform. The upcoming arrival of the Nehalem and integration of the GPU to the CPU doesn’t scare Nvidia and Hybrid SLI can be a major advantage here.

As for the APX 2500, the first "design wins" will be concretized in the third or fourth quarter of this year with the arrival of personal navigation assistants equipped with them. For portable digital players, we will have to wait until the fourth quarter or even early 2009. M. Hara declared that no other company could have targeted these two markets as well as that of the smartphone with a single and same chip. Eventually, its price should be between $8 and $12.