NVIDIA talks up Tegra in earnings call

In a first quarter earnings call, NVIDIA executives patted themselves on the back for achieving “a major milestone,” in terms of completing and qualifying the firm’s first commercially available smartphone and for making history by being “the first PC technology company […]to cross the chasm from computing to mobile computing.”
NVIDIA executives also boasted that the latest generation of dual-core Tegra chips would not only compete with Apple’s A4 chip and power major iPad competitor tablets, but that the performance of the chip would be “much better,” and more suited to the visual performance requirements of up and coming tablets.
According to transcripts on Seeking Alpha, the firm’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, told analysts he was “pretty excited about Tegra,” and that despite the fact the bar had been set “pretty high” by Apple’s A4, Tegra had what it took to compete.
Huang said NVIDIA’s first-generation strategy had been to focus on one operating system, namely the Microsoft Zune and Microsoft Win Mobile environments [Tegra is in Microsoft’s KIN].
The Nvidia chief said he was “delighted” with what his firm had been able to build, saying “it demonstrates that NVIDIA has created an architecture that’s extremely low power while being very high performance, and that we know how to build phone processors. It’s a big deal.”
He cautioned, however, that it had taken NVIDIA “a long time to figure it out,” and that Tegra had been more of a “long-term investment.”
The Microsoft offerings, he added, were the results of the first Tegra generation and the second generation will focus a lot more on Google’s Android OS. “I think the second-generation Tegra has been doing incredibly well because Android is doing incredibly well,” he explained, despite the fact we have yet to see any Android/Tegra smartphones or tablets emerge.
“Although it made sense for the first-generation Androids to use available phone processors, the follow-on generations of Android are really going to go after performance,” alleged Huang optimistically.
“we’re going to come to market with the second-generation Tegra with the third-generation Android. And so that’s our focus now,” he reiterated, expressing the hope it would all come together “at the end of the year.”
Huang hailed Apple’s iPad as a “revolutionary product” and called Apple a “leader in the space” thanks to its iPhone smartphone and upcoming iPhone 4G.
But Nvidia plans to cut in on Apple’s share of the pie, with Huang noting “we’ve talked about smartphones, we’ve talked about tablets. We have a very large number of designs in pipe and flight, and so we’re looking forward to starting in third quarter and fourth quarter, many design wins to show up in production.”
“We’ve been already working on those design sockets,” Huang assured skeptical analysts.
Despite all the Apple talk, the NVIDIA chief was also asked point blank whether his firm’s biggest competitor wasn’t indeed a company like Qualcomm.
Huang conceded that prior to Tegra, there were “only two application processor companies out in the mobile space,” these being Qualcomm and TI. “They both make wonderful application processors,” he said.
NVIDIA’s differentiation, however, “is where multimedia, high resolution, snappy graphics is really necessary.”
First-generation smartphones, posited Huang, “had pretty low resolution displays,” meaning fast graphics, high-performance multimedia and high resolution wasn’t as much of an issue.
“With iPad and next-generation smartphones, resolution’s a huge issue,” he continued, declaring “you need to have very snappy graphics with a 10×7 display, if not even bigger than that and even higher resolution than that.”
Haung said this wouldn’t be possible without an application processor designed for that specific purpose. “That’s our contribution and that’s our differentiation and that’s what people are seeking out in the market,” he proclaimed.
The NVIDIA boss also expressed his exuberance that Microsoft’s Kin had finally made it into production, lauding “all the innovative new products, the new features that [Microsoft has] brought to the marketplace and to new perspective in the mobile phone market.”
Meanwhile, Mike Hara senior vice president of investor relations and communications at NVIDIA told analysts the firm would continue to watch the smartphone and handheld space. “We have multiple next-gen Tegra designs within smartphones and tablets coming which will be announced later this year,” he assured.