NVIDIA's Huang admits to underestimating ATI

Thursday 14th August 2008, 01:02:00 PM, written by Rys

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has admitted to underestimating the strength of ATI's recent product launch lineup in its most recent financial conference call.

We quote, from Seeking Alpha:

"We underestimated the price performance of our competitor’s most recent GPU, which led us to mis-position our fall lineup. The first step of our response was to reset our price to reflect competitive realities. Our action put us again in a strong competitive position but we took hard hits with respect to our overall GPU ASPs and ultimately to our gross margins. The price action was particularly difficult since we are just ramping 55-nanometer and the weak market resulted in taking longer than expected to work through our 65-nanometer inventory."

The company's share price is at a long-time low following a string of fairly hefty blows recently, some of them their own doing.  Punching one's self in the face is rarely an enjoyable activity, extensive Beyond3D research has shown, and science proves us right with the per-share price down at $10 for a little while now.

RV770 is the company's biggest nemesis in recent times, though, with ATI finding hitherto unknown levels of performance per area, and performance per watt.  While the basic architecture of the chip is less efficient than recent NVIDIA designs, the sheer amount of raw compute it packs in to diminuitive silicon dimensions is fairly staggering, and NVIDIA must be wondering how they did it, and how to emulate it in their own products.

NVIDIA is putting some faith in the ramp of 55nm-based inventory going forward, in order to increase ASP, to reduce the financial hits they've taken recently, according to Huang and as reported by Seeking Alpha.

You can check out the Seeking Alpha piece on their website.



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