Nvidia CEO talks up mobile chips with brawny PC graphics

January 8, 2014 Leave a comment

Nvidia CEO talks up mobile chips with brawny PC graphics

Nvidia CEO Huang speaks during the Reuters Global Technology Summit in San Francisco

12:49am EST

By Noel Randewich

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Chipmaker Nvidia Corp gave new details of an upcoming chip with beefed-up graphics for mobile gadgets and cars as it faces a slowing personal computer industry and harsh competition in smartphones and tablets.The K1 is Nvidia’s first mobile chip to incorporate the Kepler graphics technology the company uses in the high-end components it makes for PC game enthusiasts, Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang told reporters at an event in Las Vegas on Sunday ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show.

Huang in recent years has expanded Nvidia’s business beyond its core PC market and into mobile devices with the company’s Tegra lineup of chips. But he has encountered heavy competition from larger Qualcomm Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in making components for tablets and smartphones.

Nvidia is betting that adding cutting-edge graphics technology to its mobile chips will entice more manufacturers and consumers to see tablets as viable alternatives to consoles for playing high-end games like first-person shooters.

“We’ve brought mobile computing to the same level as desktop computing…the same level as supercomputing,” Huang said of the K1’s graphics technology.

Nvidia’s most recent Tegra 4 processors are used in Microsoft Corp’s Surface 2 tablet and a smartphone made by Xiaomi in China, but Wall Street is concerned the company is making too little progress for the money it spends to develop the chips.

In the third quarter, sales from Nvidia’s Tegra mobile chips fell 54 percent and sales from its PC graphics chips, which account for the majority of the company’s total revenue, declined 2 percent.

The K1 was previously codenamed Logan, an alias of the comic book superhero Wolverine. An automotive version of the chip will be ideal for camera-based computation in future self-driving cars with applications like pedestrian detection and collision avoidance, Huang said.

Following in the footsteps of recent chip announcements from Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple Inc, Nvidia’s Tegra K1 lineup will also include a version with 64-bit features typically found in personal computers.

Processors with 64-bit features can take advantage of more memory than 32-bit processors now found in most mobile devices, potentially letting them work faster and more efficiently.

Current smartphones don’t have enough memory to give 64-bit processors an advantage of 32-bit chips, but future phones probably will include enough memory to give the 64-bit processors a performance boost.

Nvidia said it expects a 32-bit version of the K1 chip to appear in devices in the first half of 2014, with the 64-bit chip appearing later in the year.

With progress in mobile devices slow, Nvidia is increasingly looking to the automotive industry and cloud computing to fuel future growth. It has made deals with Audi, BMW and Tesla to use Tegra chips in dashboard entertainment and navigation systems.

At last year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Nvidia unveiled a handheld gaming device called Shield, made with its Tegra 4 chip and based on Google Inc’s Android platform. Nvidia has not said how many Shield devices it has shipped since their launch in July.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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