Nvidia lays out its plans for analysts

Tegra, Tesla and Quadro are the names of Nvidia's games.

Nvidia treated analysts to a full progress report yesterday, as the company talked up its future despite pessimism about finances.

The firm outlined plans to focus on Tesla, Tegra (low-power, integrated graphics processing for portables), ION and Quadros in the near future, with Tegra set to be the primary growth driver.

The firm told analysts a Tegra ramp was targeted for the second half of this year through to the first quarter of 2010. The green machine plans to ship $US50 million to $US100 million of Tegra-related offerings in the next few quarters, but appears uncertain whether part of those orders and revenues would slide into the first half of 2010.

Tegra certainly has its charms: a couple of super efficient ARM cores, a specially tuned processor, graphics (naturally), audio (think Portal Player acquisition), imaging and video encoding and decoding. It can also deliver crisp 1080-pixel HD video with support for web browsing and Adobe Flash.

What isn't fully known yet is what power consumption will be. But if NV can keep it low, Tegra may well be the superstar the firm hopes it to be.

The green goblin is claiming 42 design wins from 27 different manufacturers (Motorola is likely to be one) on its first generation Tegra offerings. Eighteen of these are smartphone wins. Nvidia says there will be equal emphasis on Android and Windows Mobile in the early ramp.

The company plans to release its Tegra goodies initially with carriers not OEMs. The first launch in major markets is predicted for the end of 2009.

The next version of Nvidia's Tegra, T2 (with approximately 4X efficiency), is apparently in sampling already. T3, with a purported 10x efficiency is slated for the second half of 2010.

Nvidia says seven wireless carriers have already committed to Tegra products (Wistron, Inventec, Pegatron, ICD, Compal, Mobinnova plus another) and that its total addressable market (TAM) will be around 25 milion in the carrier channel.

The total market may well be this high, but we think Nvidia is probably positioned to serve only a proportion of TAM. Nevertheless, analysts love big numbers.

Nvidia says it is expecting to see Tegra account for about 50 per cent of its overall revenue longer term. This depends on the market and whether the company can maintain average selling prices and margins to justify the 500-600 people it has working in its Tegra group and the $100 million per quarter in operating expenses.

As for Tesla, Nvidia's great hope for supercomputing, the firm told analysts it was putting great emphasis on "material improvement" using Tesla Co-processing Cluster versus Tesla Supercomputer. Nvidia also told analysts the ramp in Tesla cluster installations has been brisk since the end of 2008.

As for Nvidia's more expensive, Quadro visual computing offerings for enterprises, which include SLI, CUDA, G-sync, HD SDI and Quadro Plex, the firm expects Windows 7 to push things along nicely.

Nvidia also said it was seeing growth areas in broadcast, video trends and IPTV and hopes to set its GPU offerings apart from ATI's with features like Physix and 3D gaming. The firm is also putting a lot of emphasis on new and emerging compute-intensive applications like image/video search, face recognition, and simulation of physics.

Seems to us that Nvidia is Nvisioning rather a lot at the moment.