Last week NVIDIA posted their fiscal Q2 2012 (not a typo) financial results, and while they don’t break down how much money was made by each individual product line, Jen-Hsun Huang (pictured above), NVIDIA President and CEO, said that the company’s guidance for the next quarter looks better than ever thanks to Tegra. Revenues hit $1.02 billion, up 26% from the same quarter last year, and in terms of profits, during this quarter last year the company actually lost $175 million. Today that number is in the green, at $174 million. NVIDIA goes on to claim that 10% of all Android devices that are currently shipping pack a Tegra chip inside. That would mean either tablet sales are better than we thought they were or that 10% of Android smartphone purchases are for high end models.
So what does the future hold for NVIDIA? By the end of this year they’ll have products out on the market with their Kal-El processor (read: Tegra 3) inside, which is a quad core chip, yet manages to consume less power than the current generation Tegra 2. Rumor has it that the Tegra 3 uses the same 40 nanometer process as the Tegra 2, so we’re wondering how exactly NVIDIA managed to optimize power efficiency. Also in the pipeline is “a unified chipset that includes both a modem and an application processor that will go into lower-end smartphones” according to VentureBeat. During the conference call discussing the results, Huang said: “That part of the marketplace is really not well served by anyone, we are going to build an integrated application processor and modem to address that. That allows us to address the lower end of the smartphone, that part of the marketplace will become quite large over the next few years.” Wait a minute, doesn’t Qualcomm already do that?
Anyway, we’re excited for Tegra 3 and can’t wait to see the first devices using it!