14 DAY TRIAL // Despite all the marketing that NVIDIA has done for its products, it looks like at least one analyst group thinks that the company doesn't quite cut it.
Up until a few days ago, NVIDIA was one of the companies on Sterne Agee's “Catalyst Driven Idea List”.
This is no longer the case, the 111-year old analyst firm does not believe that the Santa Clara, California-based company is innovative enough.
One reason for this is the Tegra 3 ARM-based mobile platform and how it did not score as many design wins as some had expected.
The other motive invoked by Stern Agee is that Advanced Micro Devices has proven itself quite competitive with the 28nm Radeon HD 7970 video cards, making the fight tight on the PC market, which is not doing very well as a whole either.
“Overall PCs Continue to be Weak & New Tablet Ramps are Just Getting Announced - We believe near term PCs are seasonally weaker, and while HDD supply is improving, we believe PC demand continues to be weak,” the group says.
“With AMD ramping 28-nm Radeon HD 7970 which delivers 5-30% better graphics performance than competitor GPUs on the market, paired with integrated APU Llano and INTC's Ivy Bridge-Haswell, we continue to believe the core discrete GPU market could have some structural challenges.”
NVIDIA will launch the Kepler series of GPUs in April, around the same time as Intel intends to unleash the Ivy Bridge CPUs.
Depending on how good the cards are, and how well OEMs and consumers flock to them, Sterne may or may not upgrade NVIDIA again.
The new series of graphics products seems to be the only thing for NVIDIA to go on at the moment, since tablet design wins aren't expected to increase in number by much.
“Also for NVDA, Tegra 2 into tablets is ramping down, and while the company could have new Tegra 3 design wins into tablets, we believe the production ramp on any new tablets in the April Q will not be as material.”