Last night NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, stated that shipments of its Tegra 4 SoC to customers would begin in Q2. A few outlets incorrectly assumed this meant Q2 of NVIDIA's fiscal year, but I just confirmed with NVIDIA that Jen-Hsun was referring to calendar Q2 - in other words, the period of time between April and June 2013.

Jen-Hsun also confirmed what was announced at CES: Shield, the handheld Android gaming device (with PC streaming capabilities) based on Tegra 4, would also ship in Q2. Jen-Hsun did add that Shield will show up in the latter part of Q2, which likely points to a late May/June launch.

In short, there's no new news here. NVIDIA mentioned Q2 as the release timeframe for Shield at its press event at CES last month. Obviously Shield can't launch without Tegra 4, so it's safe to say that Tegra 4 will also be shipping in Q2. With customer shipments happening in Q2, I'd expect products (other than Shield) in late Q2 or early Q3.

The rest of the earnings call was pretty interesting. GPU revenues are still solid despite maturing processor graphics solutions (although growing slowly), and Tegra revenue was up 50% over the previous year thanks to the success of Tegra 3. NVIDIA is still struggling on the smartphone side, but tablets have been a huge part of the success of the Tegra business unit.

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  • TheJian - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link

    Is this whole site hating on NV now? I thought it was just Ryan's/Jarred's bias, but you seem to be leaving out a whole heap of news here yourself Anand. No mention of revenue/earnings share gains, buyback, dividend etc?
    "The rest of the earnings call was pretty interesting." - 'but I can't be bothered to say anything that makes nvidia look good' :) So I'll leave you with this little gem: "NVIDIA is still struggling on the smartphone side"...You'd think you'd throw a little nugget in behind that about how the T4 should have no such problems getting into the phone market due to the modem. Which depending on how this plays out, a software modem may actually be power efficient compared to hardware. If memory serves NV claims T4 is 40% more power friendly. We'll have to judge that once we get reviews, but quite a claim.

    Meanwhile as I've shown Ryan's bias before (that ridiculous 660TI article among others):
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/5465/amd-q411-fy-201...
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/5764/amd-q112-earnin...
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/6383/amd-q3-2012-ear...
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/6690/amd-q412-and-fy...

    Ryan manages to get an article out for pretty much every earnings report on AMD with glorious levels of detail analyzing ever little number...LOL. AMD paying you guys to ignore NV kicking the crap out of them? Like NV or not you'd think these numbers would cause a rumble at any site claiming a neutral stance (especially seeing the IN-DEPTH reporting Ryan does on every quarter from AMD). I would have expected something more like this (from a NON-BIASED Ryan or anyone at AT since he can't seem to write about NV without slant):
    http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/2/14/ana...

    Nevermind, I’ll do it for you below :)

    Ryans Q4 analysis of amd? : "So what’s dragging down AMD at this point in time? First and foremost of course is the continuing weakness in the PC market" followed by this propping up of his excuse for AMD, "This is the same weakness that finally drove Intel’s gross margins below 60% for the first time in years,"...ROFL...But NV is up? Shouldn't he have said, "First and foremost NV is stealing market share even while AMD keeps giving away free games costing them millions"? Ryan sure has as funny way of covering for AMD, no? I love people giving me free stuff too, but not when it's driving down margins to 15% for AMD!

    Market share gained from 53% to 65% y/y vs. AMD in desktop/server etc
    Market share of laptops up 47% to 66% YoY
    Profit up from 117mil to 174mil YoY for this Q (non-gaap 215Mil!).
    Record revenue, cash & margins this year while PC unit's down 4.9% vs 2011. We are in a CRAP economy yet NV sets a bunch of records? Not worth mentioning? Isn't this the "pretty interesting" stuff you should be reporting from the CC/earnings report?

    Beat the street 24 cents, with 28 cents (26c vs. 35c non gaap). Umm, that's blowing the street away ~14% right? No comment? Shouldn't this have been the article TITLE maybe?
    Margins are at 53.2%. This is rather excellent, and expected to stay there (52.9) this Q even amid declining T3 revenue as they await T4 rollout while winding down T3. A good T4 year may have them hitting INTEL margins :) AMD meanwhile at 15% margin? OUCH.

    AMD/Intel/TI all down Revenue YoY Q4, while NV business up 16.1% YoY Q4 (up 7.1% for full year). WHAT? I heard PC sales sucked and would kill NV/AMD's gpu business...LOL...Nah, I didn't believe it, never will. The portion of us that buy DISCRETE cards will never be satisfied by a tablet or phone (good enough, is not acceptable to us like a casual gamer) - and a good portion of us won't touch a console experience with a 10' pole (I own x360, but more to mod it that to use it as is...LOL, just saying some won't touch one). Market share may go round and round from one hot gpu designer to the next (NV/AMD etc insert name here) but we're going to buy the same amount roughly or more for a good distance into the future until all markets mature to USA standards and they may continue to find ways to soak up gpu/cpu even then in games (4k gaming would require dual cards today to play all games at 30fps+ minimum). TITAN confirmed for feb 19-21 (released 19th, reviews 21st?), no mention.

    NV TTM profits ~725mil vs. AMD 1.18B loss and NV bought back $100mil in shares 2012 while adding 300million to cash in the bank (now 3.74B cash). NV is hiring a lot of people for new projects while AMD lays off 30% of the workforce (to afford projects) and I could list a huge amount that actually just LEFT on their own. We're talking top leaders/engineers etc fleeing, basically the creators of everything they currently sell are gone) but needless to say it's a pretty distinguished list of people.

    Tegra, Tesla, and notebook GPUs all achieved record revenue. What? PC sales are down right? Every dumb analyst out there siting bad Q4 for NV said this...ROFL. WRONG. The numbers are in and they were UN-AFFECTED, and instead set RECORDS!
    Further, 30% of revenue now from NON-PC parts (tegra/cars etc). This is pretty huge news to me.

    Tegra 4 has more design wins than tegra3 (I'll believe when I see product but this is the claim). No doubt in part because Tegra4 will easily go into phones since it comes with its own modem, albeit in software. It's there now, and Grey is coming with hardware modem later this year (and probably a tegra4+ if anyone puts a really good soc out). Tegra/shield is being liked by Epic, UBIsoft and Valve with steam, so I think this will be another reason (shield) causing some buyers to migrate to kepler etc as it gets your PC gpu on your TV easily (sells another card, and makes a convert from amd, another nail in console's coffin). AMD fights with free games, while NV fights with another hardware reason to buy their stuff, now and in the future. I hate lock-ins but it's good business (from a stock buyers perspective its great - see apple's ecosystem :)).

    Global android tablets Q4 were 29.6 mil units (and tegra3 didn't get a ton of that unit #).
    Global android phones Q4 were 160mil units. They now have a shot at 5-6x more market than tegra3 had access too as phones were basically a no go. Not so now with phones and it's much easier to prove compatibility when you own the modem tech on the soc. I'd call this a battle now vs. qcom (or sammy) where last time it was more of a david/goliath (no modem and tegra3+@1.7 with better watts didn't show up until a little to late to get into anything in decent numbers). This is a much more even contest this time. Wisely NV went 6x on the gpu instead of 4x which would have ended like the exynos5 in the nexus 10 (too little to really game on at that res). Samsung went octa cpu (I think? in GS4 or at least later) leaving them supposedly with double power on the gpu via T658 (if a few days ago rumors are true, or maybe you guys are right and it's power vr 544mp3 from Brian Klug's article a month ago? or maybe it's a 5440 that's a quad with X gpu...LOL). I'd really be surprised if this gets the presumed double over T604 without really draining the battery life when taxed. I'm still trying to figure out which rumor is true with the gs4. There are so many...ROFL. If 544mp3 it's weaker than T4 I suspect no matter what you do, only T658 would be interesting here. This isn't counting whatever ipad5/iphone6 hits with (and I only gave android sales numbers, not considering any sales gained on apple's stuff-for ease of comparing here - though apple's share price etc shows maybe I should consider apple sales as available). Adrendo320 can't catch ipad3 (let alone the A6) and is only ~2.3x faster than Tegra3 (not t3+ @1.7 which you didn't bench). So Tegra4 should pretty much bury Adreno320 in everything until they replace it. The gpu and games will be the most important thing this year, as gaming ramps up the graphics on mobile. So the winner here is whoever is the fastest in july or so shipping for revenue to get in all the xmas devices. The Qcom snapdragon 600 seems to just be an up-clocked adreno 320 so I don't think that catches T4 either especially when you consider NV has a pretty solid lead IMHO in game enhancements for Tegra as the list of great looking games for tegrazone this year is growing. I'm sure others can adapt some games, but how long will people wait to get the same thing for their chips? NV is heavily concentrating on the gaming (always has as a gpu company).

    The snapdragon 800 is more interesting with the adreno 330 (will this make it into volume before xmas to get into those devices?). The a320 (on nexus4) is pushing 1/2 the res of nexus 10 (mali604) and still scores about 1/2 of nexus 10. So 330 claiming 1.75x compute vs. A320 doesn't seem like a huge threat to Mali604 let alone Tegra4 or T658. Wild card being no opengl3.0/cuda/dx11 (if info is correct here) but that only becomes useful when used in games (and T5 will surely change this). As for apps I don't think anyone will be using socs for REAL work any time soon either. Tegra4 optimizations should mitigate a lot of that anyway IMHO (until 3.0/dx11 is really needed - most dx11 effects surely would drop fps to a crawl in any soc today or this year). This is basically the same as saying NV 660TI cards lack bandwidth when you have to run a game at a res that causes <30fps min (on amd or nv) to show it (2560x1440+ etc). According to steam (and monitors on newegg) so few of us are running there it's pretty dumb to design memory bandwidth for above 1920x1200 on ~$300 cards (probably even $400, which still hit below 30fps often). People running above that have TWO CARDS according to steam's survey (even then it was only a ~2.5% market last I checked)!

    Not sure we know enough yet to comment on rogue (power vr s6) really yet, but it's another wild card I guess (no doubt it should be good). I just don't think they'll be lasting long with bigger players now in the same race (takeover target? That would change things substantially). This is a company that only has ~$100mil revenues in the last 6 months and 10-20mil profits in that time. Hmm...With Arm/Qcom/NV/Samsung/Intel all in with billions in the bank it's a tough road like AMD's. I left out Intel because I really don't think they're in this until 22nm atom or 14nm (next year's atom/soc broadwell? whatever - 22nm expected atom by end 2013 but that's not in this running then for xmas toys) and it remains to be seen if they can actually get decent graphics made by themselves & with good drivers (which to date, they've failed every time). IMG.L meanwhile had to borrow 22mil just to cover a 100mil bid for MIPS crap. This amount would be a joke to all 5 companies mentioned here. This kind of shows being in business with apple (at least for some) doesn't make you much money eh? They overpaid for it too, which shows fear I think. This sounds like ATI/AMD deal, but on a FAR smaller scale...LOL. Chip sales up 90% but they couldn't even make 30mil? Short term they are a great chip, long term vs. the 5 mentioned R&D will kill them IMHO. The big players drove them out of PC's years ago, and I think they'll be driving them from mobile now that its the next important toy so to speak :)

    I waited 5 days after the earnings report to see what you guys would say, but all we get is your post, which didn't even draw a comment...ROFL. Because you said nothing :( IF the rest of the report was "pretty interesting" why did you only dedicate 2 sentences to it or where is the follow up article with Ryan's AMD style detailed report? You should have just not wasted the space as clearly the comments here (lack of them) show. Maybe this will spark a few new comments (hopefully not dumb attacks from the regular NV haters) on all the chips mentioned here or heck a bit more on the earnings etc (which was big news in a supposedly down market).

    First post...ROFL...I digress...
  • CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link

    Good call again, with links to the glorious reporting on amd's earnings... R O F L.

    Yes, the dark side hatred must run very deep here.

    I wonder how many sexual relationships were upset and unchained when amd ran through it's last round of firing. lol Perhaps there are a few marriage certificates not fully disclosed.
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