As far as NVIDIA not bailing out Montalvo - and who knows if they will or won't it's all just rumors right now - it is pretty clear NVIDIA is not desperate to acquire x86 technology.
I agree. And I also believe that not acquiring one yet is the correct strategy for now, at the very least for a couple more months and possibly much more. What I do think matters, however, is that they are able to react quickly if the situation changes rapidly, which it very well could. It is in that context which I feel Montalvo for example could be an attractive safety net which, if I were them, would try not to lose for at least some more time. There's a big difference between writing a $15M check to keep them running and actually buying the company.
And I think given that they have been in the PC market for 15 years and have been planning for this day for quite some time, it is unlikely that they will be in a desperate position.
Oh, I agree. Desperate is very unlikely, especially for their core business. I do worry that they might miss the revenue opportunities associated with the commoditization of the x86 market however, which are significant (and even more for NV than for Intel, as for the latter that also represents some lost revenue in other ways). I'm also unconvinced their MCP business can be sustained at its current and future cash burn rates unless they expand into the single-chip x86 SoC market.
One could argue they have been late to the mobile game, or that their strategy was flawed, but no company is perfect and this is a new market.
Well, on the plus side of things, it's worth pointing out that Mike Rayfield (their handheld general manager; google his bio) only joined the company sometime in 2005, and NV's strategic decisions in the market since then have been relatively good (not stellar either imo, but it's hard to judge that very precisely without knowing what resources they had, what was already decided before, etc.) - so certainly I have some respect for that and the fact their mobile strategy seems much more viable now. Although I still have some real points of disagreement and am worried about cost-efficiency. But this isn't the right place to debate that...
If something is a legitimate threat to their core business that's another story.
Yes, in terms of GPUs I'm not too worried; in terms of MCPs though, we'll see. Certainly NV's execution there has been underwhelming lately, and their roadmap was subpar even if they had executed on it - so I'll remain slightly skeptical about their capability to react to market dynamics on time there.
3dilettante: ARM11 is used in a huge amount of smartphones today, including the iPhone, yes (although it's clocked slightly higher than the OMAP2 Intel is using as a comparison point there). As for Cortex, are you talking about the A8? Because I have indeed heard about some bad stories there (which explain why so many are remaining on the ARM11), but the A9's final RTL has only become available to lead customers very recently. I'm not sure it's very likely anyone has a perfect idea of how clock rates will turn out, so I suspect your relations were talking about the A8?
EDIT: BTW, fwiw, I'm using ARM's Cortex-A9's numbers as if they were valid for 40nm instead. So I'm already including a huge amount of 'heh ARM might be wishful thinking again' pessimism in my estimate!