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Nvidia is in the throes of a minor meltdown. Its share price is collapsing as it grapples with widespread product defects, a resurgent Advanced Micro Devices, and a weak market.
It all started when Nvidia released a statement on July 2 saying it would take a $150 million to $200 million charge to cover the costs for repair and replacement of defective graphics silicon in notebook PCs. Though Nvidia didn't name any names, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Lenovo, among others, use Nvidia graphics chips in their notebooks.
Then on Thursday, July 3, shares plunged $5.54, or just over 30 percent, and closed at $12.49. And share prices have continued to fall--though how much of the post-30-percent drop can be attributed to the weak stock market is not clear.
"There are two piece of news. One is the technical problem, the other part is that (Nvidia) isn't happy with where their business is going," said Dean McCarron, principal at Cave Creek, Ariz.-based Mercury Research.
Keener-than-usual competition is adding to product-defect woes. "Pricing has been more aggressive," McCarron said, referring to more competitive products from AMD's ATI graphics unit. "They did make some price adjustments on their GPU (graphics processing unit) products based on AMD being more competitive," McCarron said.
PC makers such as HP and Toshiba are also using more AMD-ATI graphics chips in notebook PCs, though the impact of this trend may be felt later rather than sooner. "I wouldn't necessarily look at it as being a tremendous share shift. We won't know until the end of the quarter. My suspicion is that (this quarter) a market share shift could be a small component," he said.
Beyond Nvidia's internal problems and the inter-company rivalry with AMD, McCarron sees a bigger issue looming that may affect not only Nvidia in a big way but AMD and Intel, too. "I am seeing some early signs that the market is weaker than forecast. China in particular seems to be much softer," McCarron said. This is a concern because China is now driving a lot of the growth, he said.
Stateside, an ill-timed Rambus lawsuit against Nvidia falls into the kick-them-when-they're-down category. Rambus, which makes a living--though not that successfully in recent years--suing other companies for patent infringement, has now set its sights on Nvidia. The Los Altos, Calif.-based company filed a lawsuit Thursday claiming Nvidia products with memory controllers for synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDR) and double data rate memory (DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, and GDDR3) infringe 17 Rambus patents.
But product defects will be the big issue that dogs Nvidia over the summer and weighs on its stock price. Here is an excerpt from Nvidia's 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 2. "While we have not been able to determine a root cause for these failures, testing suggests a weak material set of die/package combination, system thermal management designs."
McCarron said in some cases "you're getting enough mechanical stress that you're actually breaking the bond between the chip and the motherboard" which can cause a system with an Nvidia chip to fail.
Santa Clara, Calif.--A universal form of computer memory that can replace all of the different breeds of chips in computers and electronics today--MRAM, Spintronics, , Zettacore, silicon nanocrystals--has been a holy grail for component monkeys for a long, long time. Donovan sang about it, I think.
Several solutions have been proposed, but each one has failed to become a solution to everyone's memory needs for every application.
The latest entrant is Grandis, which has developed a magnetic type of memory chip called Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STT-RAM to his friends). Grandis has made samples and chips based on its technology will hit the market late next year.
Grandis essentially places a small magnet on top of a transistor and caps it with a layer of sensitive material. An electric current is applied. If the current goes through the magnetic junction in a bottom to top direction, that creates high resistance and that registers as a "1" in the computer. If it runs from left to right, resistance drops and the computer recognizes this as a "0",
"It is the cheapest solution out there for universal memory," said Farhad Tabrizi, CEO during a presentation at the Flash Memory Summit this week. "It is basically a transistor plus a magnet."
As an added bonus, the chips can be made on regular silicon manufacturing lines. It takes two additional steps. The additional equipment required to make STT-RAM runs about $10 million, he said.
Tabrizi, who used to work at Hynix and has been around the memory business for years, added that the company's chips will start competing against flash in a few years and could start replacing flash at 25-nanometer manufacturing, which will come around 2013 or so.
The first application will be for airbags. Grandis chips will replace the SRAM-NOR memory structure in those. It will then try to get into mobile and computing.
Renesas has licensed the technology and other companies are examining it, he said. Sevin Rosen, among other VCs, have invested in the company. Grandis has 30 patents and 50 pending applications.
"Our rates are much more reasonable than Ovonyx," he said. Ovonyx licenses technology for phase-change memory.
If they succeed, consumers and manufacturers would benefit, he said. Consumers would get smaller, faster memory, leading to cheaper devices. Manufacturers, meanwhile, wouldn't have to juggle factory capacity between different types of memory. Just put on the STT-RAM lithography masks and let 'er rip. The ultimate prize--conquest of the memory world--is a longshot. Large companies hate licensing technology, something Rambus can talk about. Magnetic memory has also had some hiccups. MRAM, promoted by Freescale, will likely run out of steam at 65 nanometers, according to Freescale. Competing ideas such as Spintronics from IBM are out there, although the word is that is having some issues.
Nonetheless, the company has a shot.
Herald the dawn of Loki, Norse god of mischief and now high-speed chip-to-chip signaling.
At the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, Rambus, the company everyone seems to love to hate, showed off for the first time a technology code-named Loki that it says could significantly cut down the energy consumed by input/output devices.
(Credit:
Rambus)
The experimental device can operate at 6.25 gigabits per second and pass information at 2.2 milliwatts per gigabit. Similar products on the market now can transfer more gigabits per second, but they operate at around 15 to 30 milliwatts per gigabit. Ergo, they consume more power, a situation that gets worse as gigabits per second increase.
For the novelty factor, Rambus also hooked up a system so that Loki would be powered by two AA batteries. The chip churned for more than 40 hours and passed 3.6 petabits of data before it conked. That's 3.6 million gigabits or 3.6 quadrillion bits of data. Frankly, I don't know what all the tubes do, but you can see the batteries on the lower left corner. Energizers.
With computer designers facing power consumption ceilings, companies have to look at every component as a way to eke out efficiency, said Robert Palmer, a researcher at Rambus who served as the primary author on the company's paper on Loki.
Ultimately, Rambus may try to license the technology.
(Credit:
Via)
Via sits a distant third behind Intel and AMD in the battle for CPU supremacy, but the Taiwanese company has found success over the years by finding niches for its products, from placing its C3 processors in thin clients and other low-power applications to building chipsets that supported SDRAM back in the Pentium III era, when Intel made the mistake of pushing RAMBUS memory exclusively. According to DigiTimes, Via is restructuring in order to put an increased focus on ultramobile PCs, believing that these UMPCs are a) poised to take off next year and b) the perfect platform for its low-voltage C7-M processors.
With their weak performance, woeful battery life, and high prices, Intel-based UMPCs from Samsung and Sony failed to impress when they were released this past summer. Hopefully, Via can spur some innovation within this area. If the Everex StepNote NC1500--a laptop that features Via's 1.5GHz C7-M processor--is any indication, however, Via-based UMPCs will be cheaper than their Intel competition but won't necessarily have improved performance or battery life. We'll test and review Via-based UMPCs as soon as we're able; stay tuned.
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