Eleven Consecutive Quarters
Sales at NVIDIA were down compared to the previous quarter, but that’s because Q1 is typically slower than Q4. Compared to last year, sales were up 24%. Sales, however, do not matter nearly so much as profits, which were also up, about 48%.
It is worth noting that NVIDIA has “improved gross margin for 11 consecutive quarters”.
For five or six quarters, NVIDIA has seen its share of notebook GPUs grow from approximately 20% to 50%.
Something of an anomaly is for a semiconductor company to increase its average selling prices (ASPs) over the years. NVIDIA “over the last 10 years has increased in ASP’s”.
At least some of NVIDIA’s processors are being manufactured on 65-nanometer process technology, which is pretty advanced for graphics. The company has “already ramped 65″.
One area in which NVIDIA was down in the first quarter was in core logic, what it calls its media and communication processors (MCPs). In spite of AMD’s acquisition of ATI, NVIDIA is still a big supplier of core logic for AMD. AMD’s losses in the channel hurt NVIDIA. NVIDIA experienced with its core logic “exactly what AMD experienced in the channel”.
Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and where there’s an Athlon CPU there’s “an nForce chipset that goes with it”.
AMD had a bad quarter. That being said, NVIDIA is seeing AMD processors picking up steam. Others may be seeing this, too, and this may be what has been driving AMD’s stock over the past couple of days. NVIDIA is seeing “AMD processors picking up significantly in this channel”.
There’s alot of room for growth for NVIDIA these days in the Intel market. Since AMD acquired ATI, NVIDIA is “the only branded GPU supplier for the Intel processor market”.
Though no products have shipped yet, NVIDIA nevertheless has the “first GeForce Motherboard GPU for the Intel market”.
NVIDIA already has a foothold in building core logic for Intel. Intel, however, builds its own core logic, too. The result is that NVIDIA occupies a niche of the high performance segment. The nForce 680i and 650i MCPs provide “the only SLI motherboards for Intel Processors”.
Intel has also opened up Centrino processor technology to NVIDIA graphics. NVIDIA timed the launch of its Geforce 8M notebook GPUs to coincide with Intel’s Santa Rosa launch. Of notebook GPUs, the GeForce 8M series is “the worlds’ first to support DirectX 10″.
Another opportunity for the future is in GPU computing, and NVIDIA is investing in this area. Computer performance under the old era of frequency ramping did not scale with Moore’s Law. Now we are in the era of multicore computing. Performance scales better. NVIDIA’s take on this phenomenon is to implement multiple graphics cores. Said the CEO, “Parallel computing is generally believed to be the path to perform scaling”.
Another area the company is investing in is application processors. The GeForce 6100 is the company’s “first application processor”.
Look for the GeForce 6100 in personal media players and multimedia smartphones. It is “a full computer on a chip”.