Last week conference call revealed many details about Nvidia’s bad performance in its financial Q4, that takes place from November until end of January.

The company's Chief financial officer Marvin D. Burkett said that this period was anything but usual and that Nvidia did have good October sales but November and onwards were worse than expected. Naturally, the financial crisis was also blamed. 

One of Nvidia’s key problems is that the partners got smart and now they are taking one to one and a half month inventory, compared to traditional two and a half to three month inventory that they traditionally had. This dramatically reduced sales for Nvidia, and the company confirmed that they have more 65nm than expected but the majority is 55nm.

In Q2 Nvidia needs to convince partners to buy larger volumes of their chips, and in order to do that, we believe that Nvidia has to offer some price protection to its partners. If the mother ship suffers, partners will too.