Tegra did horrendously, dragging the rest of the company along

Aug 9, 2013 09:22 GMT  ·  By

Tegra 4 failed to measure up to the standard placed by Tegra 3 in terms of market share, shipments and consumer interest, and the consequences have proven to be quite severe, as evident in the financial report for the second quarter of FY 2014.

NVIDIA's FY 2Q14 ended on July 28, 2013, and was a period of troubles for the world-class GPU provider.

Despite its strides in graphics processing unit development and new outlets like NVIDIA Shield handheld gaming consoles, finances took a big hit.

Compared to the same period of the previous year, overall revenue fell by 19%, to $977.2 million / €730 million.

Mostly it was because Tegra unit shipments plummeted by 71% year-over-year. Tegra 4 proved to be quite underwhelming, marketing-wise.

It was all owed to a combination of saturated tablet market, poor price-performance ratio compared to Tegra 3, and the abundance of alternative platforms (Samsung Exynos, Qualcomm Snapdragon, various other ARM Cortex chips, etc.).

Tegra earnings were of $52.6 million, or €40 million give or take. In addition to the large yearly drop, that was a 49% decrease on-quarter as well.

Obviously, NVIDIA isn't handling the changes on the mobile front very well.

Fortunately, Tegra isn't the backbone of its business, so even despite the revenue plunge of 19%, the corporation still made a profit instead of incurring a loss. The net income was of $96.4 / €72 million, thanks to good GPU sales (up 7.5% on-year).

"The GPU business continued to grow, driving our fourth consecutive quarter of record margins," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of NVIDIA.

"We also began shipping GRID virtualized graphics, which puts the power of NVIDIA GPUs into the datacenter. We look forward to a strong second half, with new Tegra 4 devices coming to market, SHIELD moving beyond the U.S. and broader sampling of Project Logan, our next-generation Tegra processor, which brings Kepler, the world's most advanced GPU, to mobile."