Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Nvidia Off 7%: Semi Accurate Sees Delay In Tegra Roadmap

Shares of Nvidia (NVDA) are down 98 cents, or 7%, at $14.19, and swung as low as $13.86, and the catalyst would appear to be a negative piece today by Semi Accurate’s Charlie Demerjian, which claims that Nvidia’s roadmap for its “Tegra” processor for smartphones and tablets has slipped by a year.

Demerjian writes that the company, facing delays with a part named “T40,” an intended 28-nanometer part based on an ARM Holdings (ARMH) “A9″ CPU core, since upgraded to an “A15″ core, has rolled out a “stopgap” part called the “T35,” meant to be less ambitious, a mere shrink of the existing “Tegra 3” chip, “Kal-El.” This is the new “Tegra 4” part, while the “more ambitious T40 now has to wait, says Demerjian.

On top of that, “Insiders tell us that Denver is the T50 core, T50 is the chip family based around it, not the other way around. Or at least it was before everything slipped a few weeks ago.”

There’s a lot of inside baseball in all this, and there are no sources mentioned, it all seems to be anonymous sourced, as far as I can tell.

Demerjian’s conclusion is:

The Tegra roadmap just slipped a year. Nvidia faces a rather painful 2012 and likely early 2013 with a core that is a generation behind, so expect lots of self-congratulatory press releases. In the mean time, Qualcomm is releasing Krait, TI has OMAP5, and Nvidia has hot air. Anyone want to join our pool for when the stock bubble bursts?

However, on confusing aspect is the inclusion in the article of references to “Denver,” a 64-bit chip really meant more for high-end compute tasks, not for mobile devices.

R! aymond J ames’s Hans Mosesmann remarked responded to a phone call I placed this morning, telling me that he thinks there’s no delay in Tegra’s roadmap, and that “Denver is an entirely different direction for Nvidia beyond Tegra,” and therefore has nothing to do with Tegra.

Compoundind injury today, it would appear that JP Morgan’s Harlan Sur has a note out making reference to Demerjian’s piece. More on that as it becomes available.

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