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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nvidia ± financials, punching, in, the, face, jen, hsun, huang, seeking, alpha


Latest Thread Comments (509 total)
Posted by INKster on Wednesday, 15-Oct-08 05:18:21 UTC
Quoting Rufus
But I thought Nvidia was getting out of the chipset business - Charlie and "analysts" said so so it must be true. Now Apple's entire line is using Nvidia chipsets. One of these two does not make sense.
They're both right.Nvidia did exit the "chip-set" business and now has just... a chip, for both AMD and Intel-based CPU platforms. ;)That's the advantage of integration, and the company itself had proclaimed the death of their traditional Northbridge/Southbridge chipsets quite some time ago (around the nForce 790i SLI launch, if i'm not mistaken).It's funny though. Apple chose to use expensive 1.5v DDR3-1066 RAM IC's across the board with MCP79/Geforce 9400M, yet that chip also supports the much cheaper DDR2-667/800.Frankly, i think a 0.3v difference can't make that much of a difference on battery life in the real world. The delta between DDR's 2.6v and DDR2's 1.8v was much larger.

Posted by silent_guy on Wednesday, 15-Oct-08 07:13:37 UTC
Quoting INKster
Frankly, i think a 0.3v difference can't make that much of a difference on battery life in the real world. The delta between DDR's 2.6v and DDR2's 1.8v was much larger.
I haven't really gone through the raw numbers and there'll obviously be a chunk of marketing speak in there, but according to this page (http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/products/dram/Products_DDR3SDRAM.html):
Quote
DDR3 not only allows for higher system performance, but it also uses only 1.5V of power compared to DDR2's 1.8V, thereby extending battery life by approximately 20 minutes.
Even if it's only 10 minutes, that's still significant enough to go for DDR3, especially if your customers typically have a known tendency to pay more than for your than for other brands...Edit: So I did look it up... The highest current (IDD7 in the data sheet) in a 2GB DIMM for a Samsung 1066 DDR3 = 2640mA. For a similar 667 DDR2, it's 2120mA. Multiplied by 1.5V and 1.8V respectively, gives 3.96W vs 3.82W... So DDR2 is doing better here, barely.I thought maybe some other numbers would give the advantage to DDR3, but that doesn't seem to be the case.Obviously, corrected for performance, DDR3 should win in terms of perf/W...

Posted by Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. on Wednesday, 15-Oct-08 07:42:45 UTC
Quoting Rufus
But I thought Nvidia was getting out of the chipset business - Charlie and "analysts" said so so it must be true. Now Apple's entire line is using Nvidia chipsets. One of these two does not make sense.
The actual (current) rumour is that Nvidia is going to sell it's chipset business lock, stock and barrel to Apple who will continue to run it for it's own PC business.

Posted by INKster on Wednesday, 15-Oct-08 12:40:01 UTC
Quoting Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
The actual (current) rumour is that Nvidia is going to sell it's chipset business lock, stock and barrel to Apple who will continue to run it for it's own PC business.
Frankly, i find that proposition completely ridiculous.During yesterday's presentation, a particular slide showed MCP79's die, and Apple itself said 70% of it was pure IGP, while the remaining 30% shared Northbridge and Southbridge duties.Do you see Nvidia handing out key DX10/OpenGL 3.0/CUDA hardware intellectual property to Apple just like that ? Not me...

Posted by Arun on Wednesday, 15-Oct-08 12:48:35 UTC
There is uncertainty regarding how successful they can be because of QuickPath, DMI and Fusion, but NVIDIA definitely has a roadmap. And I think MCP7C is still aimed at 1H09, probably 1Q09 (Socket 775, 4 TMUs, 8 SPs, 64-bit DDR2, 4xSATA/2xPATA, 10xUSB). If you look at the MCP7A die shot released by Apple, it's very clear they were planning on a half-MCP7A from the start ;) (see: live.gizmodo.com/page/6) - BTW, MCP7A is apparently 8 TMUs+16 SPs while G98 & MCP78 are 4 TMUs + 16 SPs. No idea about the MUL in either case, heh.MCP79 will also be the first NVIDIA MCP to support VIA CPUs, and will be manufactured on 55nm. Beyond that, I suspect they don't have anything pre-40nm. Either way, any and every rumour you heard about NVIDIA's chipset business is bullshit.

Posted by INKster on Wednesday, 15-Oct-08 15:47:19 UTC
But isn't DMI just basically the same as PCI-Express x4 ?What's so troubling about using the same MCP7A chip on a mainstream Core i7 motherboard in LGA-1160 guise next year ?Theoretically, it would be even better, as then they would be able to turn off the memory controller ("Lynnfield" retains the integrated memory controller, even though it's limited to dual-channel, instead of triple-channel like "Nehalem"/"Bloomfield") and, with it, improve yields/lower costs.

Posted by Arun on Wednesday, 15-Oct-08 19:50:00 UTC
Quoting INKster
But isn't DMI just basically the same as PCI-Express x4 ?What's so troubling about using the same MCP7A chip on a mainstream Core i7 motherboard in LGA-1160 guise next year ?Theoretically, it would be even better, as then they would be able to turn off the memory controller ("Lynnfield" retains the integrated memory controller, even though it's limited to dual-channel, instead of triple-channel like "Nehalem"/"Bloomfield") and, with it, improve yields/lower costs.
DMI is a proprietary form of PCI-Express x4, I presume the I/O is the same, the PHY is slightly different, and the MAC is extremely different. So I think it might be possible to reuse the same silicon, but it does require designing it with that in mind.Secondly, there's the "little" problem of bandwidth. The LGA-1160 chip will communicate to the integrated GPU not through DMI, but through the PCI Express x16 slot. However, that risks being extremely bandwidth limited; so the logical answer would be to use that memory controller as a "sideport" to memory soldered on the motherboard. This is starting to become quite complex, and it's very unlikely MCP7A was designed with any of those goals in mind either...Plus, a 65nm IGP seems pretty pointless to me in that timeframe! :)

Posted by Jawed Rambus at it again on Friday, 07-Nov-08 17:07:51 UTC
Wants an exclusion order, seemingly for the patent dispute that came up back in July. http://www.rambus.com/us/news/press_releases/2008/081106.html
Quote
The complaint seeks an exclusion order barring the importation, sale for importation, or sale after importation of products that infringe nine Rambus patents from the Ware and Barth families of patents. The accused products include NVIDIA products that incorporate DDR, DDR2, DDR3, LPDDR, GDDR, GDDR2, and GDDR3 memory controllers, including graphics processors, and media and communications processors.
Jawed

Posted by fellix on Friday, 07-Nov-08 19:41:31 UTC
GDDR5 -- a safe harbor, then? :p

Posted by Kaotik on Monday, 10-Nov-08 02:53:00 UTC
Quoting fellix
GDDR5 -- a safe harbor, then? :p
While perhaps unlikely, do we actually know that nV HAS a GDDR5 memory controller to begin with? :razz:


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