Well here's a turn up for the books. Amid plummeting stock prices and warnings of double dip recessions, NVIDIA's shares rose by 18% during after hours trading on the NASDAQ yesterday, after the company's quarterly financial report came out.
The company said that sales were up 5.7% on the previous quarter, and it wasn't just demand for its Tegra processor in tablets either. According to the report, laptop graphics were also up and sales of desktop GPUs in line with seasonal expectations. The company isn't just celebrating good sales either, gross margin (the amount of profit per sale) was also up by 1.3%.
What makes this interesting is that many commentators – myself included – have speculated on NVIDIA's future in the PC market. With AMD and Intel bundling GPUs onto their CPU silicon, the question over what happens to specialists in discrete graphics cards has hung heavy over their heads.
According to NVIDIA's statement, though, it's had a particularly good quarter because of Sandy Bridge. There's a lot of demand for machines with a second GPU that can switch on to power games, apparently.
This could change in the future, of course, as hybrid chips get better over time. But then there's NVIDIA's own Project Denver, which will see it produce a desktop CPU and GPU hybrid itself, probably in time for Windows 8.
There's more figures at EE Times , and the report itself can be downloaded here .
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