jen-hsun huang

Nvidia CEO unveils next two gens of Tegra, dubbed Logan, Parker

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang today talked up the chipmaker's next two generations of mobile chip, saying the Tegra chip line will show a 100-times improvement in strength from the first chip to the fifth.

The current Tegra chip, Tegra 4, hit the market earlier this year. The next generation, coming later this year, is code-named Logan, while the fifth generation of Tegra is code-named Parker, Huang said at the company's GPU developers' conference.

Logan will incorporate Nvidia's Kepler GPU, which currently is dominating the discrete graphics market. It also will include CUDA, Nvidia's programming model for … Read more

Nvidia CEO sees tenfold growth in mobile-chip biz

Nvidia, best known for its high-end graphics chips, will generate a vast majority of its revenue from its now burgeoning mobile-processor business, according to outspoken Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang.

Huang, speaking to a roundtable of reporters today, said he expects the mobile-chip business to grow tenfold, to $20 billion by 2015. In comparison, the graphics processor business is expected to grow 75 percent, to $7 billion in the same time frame. He added he expects to maintain a strong share in both businesses.

"We'll be quite a force to contend with," Huang said.

Over the past few … Read more

Nvidia touts quad-core chip for Android, Windows 8

Nvidia's CEO boasted about the power frugality of an upcoming quad-core chip, as the company reported better-than-expected earnings today.

The graphics chip supplier swung to better-than-expected earnings in the fiscal second quarter ended July 31, buttressed by revenue from laptop graphics processing units used with systems built around Intel's "Sandy Bridge" processors.

Nvidia reported a profit of $151.6 million compared with a loss of $141 million in the year-earlier period. Revenue surged 25 percent to $1.02 billion. And gross margin--a critical profit indicator--jumped to 51.7 percent from 16.6 percent compared to last … Read more

Nvidia CEO: Android tablets could outsell iPad in 3 years

Android tablets could outsell Apple's iPad in less than three years, says Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, according to Reuters.

Speaking at the Reuters Technology Summit in New York on Monday, the outspoken CEO noted that it took Android smartphones less than three years to outpace the iPhone.

"The Android phone took only two and a half years to achieve the momentum that we're talking about," Huang said at the summit. "I would expect the same thing on Honeycomb tablets."

With Nvidia supplying the Tegra 2 processor that powers many Android tablets, Huang has been … Read more

Nvidia CEO: Why Android tablets aren't selling

Nvidia's CEO is not pleased with the cool reception Android tablets have gotten so far. And he expressed frustration over marketing gaffes in an interview with CNET earlier this week.

Sales of the first Android Honeycomb tablet, the Motorola Xoom, have not been impressive when compared with those of the iPad. Though Motorola claimed in late April that Xoom shipments hit 250,000, that number is far lower than the total being enjoyed by market leader Apple, which sold about 1 million iPad 2 tablets in the first weekend of sales alone.

During an earnings conference call, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, articulated part of the problem, saying, "Consumers want more apps for Android tablets."

That's not the whole story, according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who I chatted with on Thursday. Nvidia's Tegra 2 is the core piece of silicon inside Honeycomb tablets, including the Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

"It's a point of sales problem. It's an expertise at retail problem. It's a marketing problem to consumers. It is a price point problem," he said, for starters.

Though Huang didn't mention the $499 starting price for the iPad, it was clear that this was a reference point. "The baseline configuration included 3G when it shouldn't have," he said. "Tablets should have a Wi-Fi configuration and be more affordable. And those are the ones that were selling more rapidly than the 3G and fully configured ones," he said. … Read more

Nvidia CEO: 'No disruption' on Sandy Bridge chip

Nvidia's CEO said his company has seen no disruption in schedules to deliver Sandy Bridge-based products to customers. His comments came during Nvidia's earnings conference call yesterday.

In response to an analyst's question about the Sandy Bridge chipset delay, Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said Nvidia has "not experienced a disruption so far. [Intel] paused, but I think Intel is doing quite a good job of helping everyone cover," he added.

Huang also addressed Intel's Sandy Bridge graphics silicon--which is built into the main Sandy Bridge processor--versus Nvidia's higher-octane chips.

"The PC industry … Read more

Nvidia CEO: Future laptops will mirror MacBook Air

Nvidia's CEO added his two cents to an increasingly popular theory on laptop design: that is, the MacBook Air as a template for all future designs.

In case you're wondering where the laptop is headed--circa 2014--Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang offered what could be considered a highly educated guess in response to a question I posed to him in a phone interview today.

"You'll have trouble finding one that doesn't look like the MacBook Air," he said. "I think the Macbook Air is a good mental image of what a clamshell laptop will look … Read more

Nvidia CEO: We have a CPU strategy

Nvidia's chief executive officer is emphatic that his company has a strategy for building processors beyond its mainstay graphics chips.

During an interview with CNET, Jen-Hsun Huang addressed an issue with the company's chips and spoke about ongoing Intel litigation.

On Thursday, Nvidia reported a second-quarter net loss of $141 million, or 25 cents per share, worse than the net loss of $105.3 million, or 19 cents a share, a year earlier. The graphics processing unit (GPU) supplier--whose chips are found in PCs from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer, Sony, and Toshiba--cited muted demand for consumer graphics chips and economic weakness in Europe and China, which drove consumers to lower-priced products. Nvidia products typically are targeted at the upper end of the market.

In the earnings announcement, the company addressed a longstanding issue--and ongoing financial burden--centered on a defect in some of its earlier GPUs and chipsets. The problem was first cited by Nvidia in July 2008 when it announced a charge ranging from $150 million to $200 million to cover costs to repair and replace GPUs and chipsets due to "weak die/packaging material" in older laptop products. "Die/packaging" essentially describes the chip. Nvidia also announced additional charges after July 2008.

On Thursday, Nvidia said it recorded an "additional net charge" of $193.9 million related to the same problem. "The charge includes additional remediation costs as well as the estimated costs of a pending settlement of a class action lawsuit related to this matter," the company said in a statement. Combined with the $282 million of net charges announced previously, the total net charge related to the issue comes to $475.9 million, the company said.

I asked Huang Thursday if he thought the problem was now largely… Read more

Intel exec responds to Nvidia smear

Intel and Nvidia are exchanging barbs (again), after Nvidia's CEO made disparaging remarks about Intel processors in a recent interview.

The tension between the two companies has been heating up as the rivalry intensifies. The Silicon Valley neighbors are now competing on a growing number of fronts: laptop graphics chips, smartphone silicon, and supercomputing processors. Intel and Nvidia are also in the throes of a legal dispute that bars Nvidia from building chipsets for Intel's latest generation of processors.

The latest tiff began when Nvidia's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, was asked about the prospects for Intel's new "Moorestown" Z6 series of Atom processors in a recent interview with Laptopmag.com. His response was not pretty. "You could give an elephant a diet but it's still an elephant," he said, implying that Intel Atom processors are too big and too power hungry to be viable in smartphones.

On Wednesday an Intel executive shot back. Anand Chandrasekher, a senior vice president, speaking at a Barclays Capital conference that was streamed on the Web, cited Huang's comment, then said: "The famous Jen-Hsun...needs to get his facts straight and he needs to get his math checked."

Chandrasekher continued. "(Intel) can hit the power consumption of a smartphone. It's not a matter of a physical limit. It is not a matter of a lack of design ingenuity. It is simply a matter of focus and psychology. Up until now, we didn't target the power levels of the smartphone using x86," he said, referring to Intel's chip architecture. And he added that Intel had achieved a "50X" reduction in power with Moorestown.

Chandrasekher, however, admitted that the Moorestown chip is just a starting point for Intel.… Read more