Nvidia seeks salvation in Windows 7

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 8 May 2009 at 09:09

Nvidia's watched its first quarter revenues plummet by 42% from last year, but the company hopes Windows 7 will help turn things around.

Nvidia's first quarter revenues dropped to $664.2 million from $1.2 billion in the same quarter last year.

Despite this, Nvidia still beat analyst forecasts of $534.4 million and managed to arrest the slump that saw the company rake in only $481.1 million in its previous quarter.

All told, its first quarter revenues were up 38% from the fourth quarter 2008, meaning net losses held at $201.3 million.

Despite the red ink, the company's chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang painted a rosy picture of the future, with both Windows 7 and its Tegra chips playing a large part.

"DXCompute is the single most important new API from Windows 7," he claims. "What's exciting to me is that come Windows 7, when DXCompute comes out, the difference between a computer that has DXCompute accelerated by a GPU versus one that does not is not 10% or 15%, it's 20, 30 times."

He also waxed lyrical about the company's new Tegra chips, which bundle ARM processors with GeForce graphics. Huang is looking for Tegra to make a significant splash in the smartphone market, and the company has dedicated around 500 people to the project.

There's no word on when the first products based on Tegra are set to appear.