Nvidia posts $141 million loss in Q2, consumer business to blame

Graphics chip maker Nvidia has released its fiscal Q2 earnings, and while some of the more industry-oriented products – "Quadro professional graphics, Tesla GPU computing, and our Tegra system-on-a-chip business" – have delivered "excellent results" the "GeForce consumer business fell significantly short of expectations."

What does that mean in dollars and cents? A net loss of $141m for Q2, down from a loss of $105m for the same period last year. It's a notable drop from the company's Q1 profits of $138m. So why were earnings down, though revenue of $811m was actually up from the same time last year? "Results were impacted by a large inventory write-down," the earnings report says. "The inventory write-down was a consequence of weakened demand for consumer graphics processing units (GPUs) as higher memory prices and economic weakness in Europe and China led to a greater-than-expected shift to lower-priced GPUs and PCs with integrated graphics."

So it's the same old story: global economic meltdown leading to PC sales with cheaper – or even integrated! – GPUs. Wow, the future is bizarre.