Nvidia posts a loss

But it's not all bad news, says Nvidia's CEO.

The chips may be down, but Tegra will save the day, according to Nvidia CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, speaking to analysts about his firm's first-quarter loss yesterday.
The company posted a net loss of $US201.3 million - 37 cents a share - with revenue down 42 percent year on year from $US1.15 billion to $US664.2 million.

Huang said the good news, however, was that Nvidia beat analysts' estimates and the firm's inventory dropped from a daunting 144 days to just 64 days sequentially. "We made good progress managing expenses and significantly reducing inventory," he said.

In Q108, Nvidia had posted a $US176.8 million profit, but the firm took solace in the fact its quarterly revenue grew 38 per cent sequentially from Q408 and beat analyst's expectations for $US534 million revenue in the quarter.
Huang said the firm is pinning its future hopes on the Tegra system-on-a-chip (SOC) and the hope that Windows 7 will provide new avenues of opportunity in graphics based applications.

"Of all the products in our company, Tegra long term has the largest TAM (Total Available Market)," said Huang, noting that Nvidia had been "investing in Tegra for about four years" and had 500 people working on the project.
Tegra, which relies on an ARM processor, will become the second computing revolution predicted the enthusiastic CEO, consuming less than one watt in power and purportedly providing a full high-definition experience to users.

Jen-Hsun referred to his company's baby as a "computer completely from scratch that's the size of a penny".
The Nvidia chief also claimed the upcoming release of Windows 7 will show the world what a GPU can do to boost a system's speed and that DirectX Compute would at long last make it possible to edit videos in a non "excruciating" fashion.

Ion was not neglected by the Nvidia CEO either, with Huang expanding the term to any offerings using a 9400M GeForce chipset, like MacBooks for instance, which he claimed are providing the bulk of Ion's revenue at the moment.
A full transcript of Nvidia's earnings conference call with analysts is available here.