Tegra Does Much to Boost NVIDIA Revenues in Q2

As one would have likely expected, the Tegra line of ARM-based mobile SOCs (system-on chip devices) can be attributed much of the credit for the way NVIDIA saw revenue growth.

Those keeping track of such things will likely have already learned of NVIDIA's favorable financial performance during the second FY2012 quarter.

Having grown both sequentially and on-year, the fears were at least partially allayed that troubles could arise due to how AMD's and Intel's APUs are threatening the existence of low-end and even some mainstream GPUs.

Then again, it would not be an accurate summation to say that the GPU business of NVIDIA was solely responsible for the positive evolution.

Indeed, desktop GPU revenue actually slid down, though notebook and professional solutions went up.

“Desktop GPU revenue declined in the quarter in line with typical seasonality, while notebook GPU revenue increased as we continued to gain significant market share on the Intel Sandy Bridge platform,” explained Karen Burns, interim chief financial officer at Nvidia.

“Channel inventory declined slightly in the quarter and remained comfortably within our target levels. This was the first full quarter for our patent cross license agreement with Intel, with $65.9 million of revenue recognized in the second quarter.”

In the meantime, the Tegra platform, as well as the baseband chips gained after the acquisition of Icera, played an essential role. All in all, consumer product revenue was up quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) by 36.8%.

"Our consumer products business, which includes Tegra smartphone and tablet products, and now Icera baseband processors and RF transceivers, as well as our embedded products, was up 36.8% over the prior quarter, at $167.7 million,” said the chief financial officer.

“Much of the increase was driven by seasonally up game console royalties and refreshes in embedded entertainment products. Tegra was steady as the product ramps in the first quarter hit shelves. Icera’s contribution was not significant."