Nvidia has posted a worse-than-expected $141 million loss for its second fiscal quarter ending August 1, a further decline on the $105 million loss reported in the year-ago quarter. The GPU firm has had a rough stretch this year with its GF100-based products being both late and relatively unsuccessful.
However, it partly blames the deficit on increased memory costs, a weakening demand for consumer graphics chips, along with poor economic conditions in Europe and China steering customers to budget goods. Nvidia, as you well know, pays more attention to the costly performance segment.
The company's bottom line was also dented by the $193.9 million it set aside to continue repairing and replacing the faulty GPUs that plagued systems from HP, Dell, Apple and others a couple years back. The total on that fiasco is now $475.9 million, but CEO Jen-Hsun Huang believes it's just about over.
Nvidia is still blocked from making chipsets for Intel's latest processors, and although that can't help things financially, Huang believes the damage has already been done. Even if the matter were resolved, Nvidia doesn't plan to "ramp back up" the thousand engineers it had working on chipsets.
Going forward, the company claims to have a long-term CPU strategy, and that will heavily focus on ARM-based smartphone and tablet chips. "ARM is the fastest growing processor architecture in the world today," Huang said. "ARM supports Android best. And Android is the fastest growing OS..."