Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said mobile devices powered by the company's quad-core chips will start hitting the market before the holiday season.
Nvidia officials say that the first mobile devices using its quad-core Tegra
3 chip should start shipping by the fourth quarter, in time for the
all-important holiday season.
Nvidia
first demonstrated the quad-core
chip-codenamed Kal-El-at the Computex show in May. Now the company has
begun shipping the chip and expects the devices to hit the market later this
year.
The
announcement came during a financial update given by Nvidia executives Sept. 6,
during which they touted not only their traditional graphics business, but also
their growing mobile computing technology. For its fiscal year 2013-which
begins Jan. 30, 2012-Nvidia
expects revenues of $4.7 billion to $5 billion, more than the $4.45 billion
expected by analysts.
Nvidia
President and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang attributed the strong outlook to the rapidly
growing mobile computing space.
"We
see growth across our entire GPU and
mobile-processor business," Huang said in a statement. "The future
for computing is visual and mobile, and we are well positioned to lead in this
new era."
Nvidia
has been a major player in the graphics space for years. More recently, the
company, using designs from ARM Holdings,
has moved aggressively into the mobile chip market, and has gotten a number of
design wins thanks to its Tegra line of products. The mobile chip strategy has
placed it into competition with a number of other chip makers, including Qualcomm,
Texas Instruments and Samsung, which also
rely on ARM designs.
However,
Huang told
the Wall Street Journal that at this point, the only real competition
Nvidia has in the mobile chip space is Qualcomm.
"Aside
from the two of us, there's really not too many people actively on the dance
floor," he told the newspaper. "It's mostly us and Qualcomm competing
for most of the slots."
Both
are competing in the Android tablet and smartphone spaces, though Apple still
dominates the overall tablet space with its iPad and is a significant figure in
smartphones with its iPhone portfolio. Apple uses its own chips for those
products.
However,
during a roundtable discussion with reporters, Huang reportedly said that he
expects Android-based tablets to make up 50 percent of the market by 2015, and
that Nvidia's Tegra 1 or 2 chips are already installed in half of the high-end Android
smartphones and 70 percent of Android tablets.
Nvidia
also expects to begin leveraging the wireless baseband technology it acquired
through its
$367 million acquisition in May of Icera. Huang said the company will start
sampling chips that integrate the technology into its Tegra products, which he
said will help drive down costs.
All
this will mean big business for Nvidia's mobile chip business, which officials
expect will grow to $20 billion by 2015. Meanwhile, its PC GPU
business will see revenues grow to $7 billion in four years.
However,
Nvidia and others also must keep an eye on x86-based chip makers Intel and
Advanced Micro Devices, both of which are looking to muscle their way into the
tablet and ultra-portable PC spaces. In addition, Intel expects to become a
significant player in the smartphone market as well.
Huang
appeared to dismiss the threat from Intel and AMD,
saying they are too late to the market.
"If
you don't have a mobile strategy, you're in deep turd," Huang reportedly
said. "If you're not in mobile processors now, you're seven years too
late."
Microsoft's
decision to enable its upcoming Windows 8 operating system to support
system-on-a-chip (SoC) architectures-particularly ARM-will
give a significant boost to Nvidia's business as well as other ARM
partners, he said. Right now, Windows runs solely on the x86 architecture of
Intel and AMD.
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