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Nvidia’s profit margins have hit a record high, thanks to growth in its high-end GPU and GPGPU products helping to shore up a slowdown in Tegra business.

Nvidia has bucked the current PC market slowdown, posting boosted profits compared to the same time last year thanks to strong sales of its high-end Kepler-based GPU products.

According to the company’s quarterly filing report, the company made an impressive $954.7 million in the first quarter of its financial year 2014 – and while that’s down a disappointing 13.7 per cent compared to the last quarter of FY13, when the company took in a whopping $1.11 billion, it represents a 3.2 per cent gain on the same period last year. With other PC-related companies complaining of slowing sales and tight margins, that’s not too shabby at all – and comes at the very top of the company’s previous projections.

‘Our results this quarter came in at the upper end of our guidance, driven by strong sales of higher-end GPU products for PC gaming,‘ explained Nvidia’s Rob Csongor, vice president of investor relations, during the company’s conference call late last night. ‘We made good progress on our key strategies as the Kepler GPU architecture, which delivers outstanding performance and energy efficiency drove strong GeForce demand with PC gamers and began to flow through our Quadro and Tesla businesses in new products.‘

Keplar on the rise
Increased uptake of high-priced Kepler boards, especially in the workstation market, have seen the company’s margins rise to a record 54 per cent – 1.4 points up on the last quarter, and 4.2 per cent year-on-year. ‘There are always puts and takes but this improvement reflects our richer mix of higher margin products as well as the underlying value of our GPUs in the marketplace and our focus on cost,‘ claimed Burns. ‘For Q2, we expect margins to remain within the same 54% range as Q1 with a high mix of our higher margin products.‘

Another major win for the company has been uptake of GeForce Grid, the company’s GPU-powered cloud computing platform, and its closely-aligned workstation-centric Grid Visual Computing Appliance (VCA). ‘In the short time since we began taking Grid to market this quarter, we’ve engaged over 100 Grid VGX and Grid VCA trial customers and signed many of the top Adobe, Autodesk and SolidWorks resellers to take Grid VCA to market,‘ claimed Csongor. ‘We believe Grid VCA represent a potential $3 billion market opportunity.‘

Discussing the slowing PC market and growth of tablets, Nvidia’s co-founder, chief executive and president Jen-Hsun Huang was bullish on his company’s future in the discrete GPU market. ‘ People who build high-end gaming PCs, and people who are enthusiasts, and who enjoy having the most performance on the desktop, or people who are building these PCs for their own video editing hobbies, or the maker people who are designing 3D objects and then printing it at home, they print their own jewellery, they print their own, I don’t know what, telephones: they need to be designing 3D somehow, and those PCs tend to have GPUs inside,‘ explained Huang. ‘And that’s a movement that’s really growing fast. So, I would say that desktop PC market that we target, that we serve, is quite a vibrant market.‘

An admission from Huang of just how high the margins on his company’s enterprise-grade products are – the Grid family and the Tesla GPGPU accelerator boards – provides a glimpse asto the headline-grabbing 54 per cent profit margin: ‘Grid and Tesla are much higher than 54 per cent,‘ Huang explained, ‘[while] Tegra is lower than 54 per cent. Whenever our gaming business improves, it helps gross margins. Whenever GTX improves, it helps gross margins. When Tesla grows, it helps gross margins. Notebooks obviously drag the gross margins down, because they tend to be a more competitive business. Low-end desktop PC business tends to drag gross margins, but that’s not a very large business [for Nvidia] anyhow.‘

‘You know, the PC market declined 10 per cent quarter-over-quarter, but we declined only 6 per cent quarter-over-quarter,’‘ added Csongor. ‘That difference comes from growth in the non-commodity PC space. Non-commodity PC space will tend to be Tesla and Quadro and GTX, and those growths are always good for us and that helps gross margins. That’s also where we are putting most of our energy. Most of our energy related to GPGPU, related to extending our GPU beyond the PC into our datacentres and servers all the work that has led to the announcement of Cisco, and IBM, and Dell and HP launching their GPU servers, all of that kind of growth is good and I think we are just gearing up for Grid becoming a larger and larger component of our business – and that’s good for our margins.‘

Tough time for Tegra
But what of Tegra, the company’s ARM-powered system-on-chip product? Back in November, the company claimed that a large proportion of its growth was coming from non-PC products, meaning Tegra and its related chipsets. Well, things appear to be slowing down a little on that front – the company has reported a 50.5 per cent dip in revenue sequentially, and 22.2 per cent year-on-year – likely as a result of increased competition from the like of Qualcomm’s popular Snapdragon family and as the market waits for the first Tegra 4 products to hit shop shelves – due, Csongor claimed, during the next financial quarter.

‘Sales volume of Tegra 3 processors declined as customers began to ramp down production of Tegra 3 base mark phones and tablets,‘ admitted Karen Burns, the company’s interim chief financial officer and vice president, during the call. ‘We expect this to continue in to the next quarter as customers start to announce Tegra 4 design with further new designs and phone ramp starting in the second half of the year.‘

Beyond a commitment to launch Tegra 4 into the market – or at least have some of its customers announce devices powered by the chip, and its Tegra 4i LTE-modem integrated variant – by the end of the next quarter, Nvidia was silent on impending product launches, except to say that it expects an uptick in sales when Intel launches its Haswell processor family at Computex in June.

For those who like full figures: the company’s Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP) revenue for the quarter was $954.7 million on a gross margin of 54.3 per cent. With operating expenses for the quarter totalling $435.8 million, that makes for a total net profit for the quarter of $77.9 million – or $0.13 per share. Investors appear to have taken the news cautiously: despite hitting the top end of its projections, Nvidia’s stock price is steady having climbed just 1.01 per cent in after-hours trading.

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Out comes the Ouya motherboard.

(Credit:
Ouya)

Ouya, the open-source game console that took the Kickstarter world by storm, has been ripped apart by the folks over at iFixit.

The Ouya device earned a score of 9 out of 10 from iFixit for its high repairability. The iFixit team was able to tear apart the gadget with ease, and found that it was packed with several important components, including two Samsung 4-gigabit SDRAM modules (for a total of 1 gigabyte), a Texas Instruments power management tool, and Nvidia’s Tegra 3 multicore CPU.

Interestingly, because of the Ouya’s small size, the company was forced to add weight to the console. Ouya did that by including five metal weights in the case to make it more bottom-heavy. iFixit believes the weights are designed to keep stable the cables connected on the back.

Ouya was a Kickstarter heavyweight last year, earning millions of dollars in donations from its supporters. The console is designed to be open source, and according to Ouya, will be updated each year with better specs to keep up with the technologies that game developers want to use.

The console, which is currently available for preorder, costs just $99 and comes with a controller. An extra controller will set customers back $50.

Speaking of the controller, iFixit found that it comes equipped with an ARM Cortex M3 processor. As with the console, the controller is easy to take apart, but iFixit warned that the joysticks are actually soldered to the circuit board, meaning the whole device would need to be replaced if the joysticks were damaged in some way.

Correction 7:55 a.m. PT:
This story initially gave an incorrect figure for the SDRAM modules in the Ouya device. The console has a pair of 4-gigabit SDRAM modules.

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Mobile phones may soon be more powerful than consoles. But where to plug in the controllers…

According to Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President of Content Technology for Nvidia, the next generation of mobile phone graphics processors will outperform those of the PS3 or Xbox 360.

“The PS3 and Xbox 360 are barely more powerful than mobile devices… The next click of mobile phones will outperform [them],” said Tamasi, referring to the chip generation that will follow the company’s current Tegra 4 model, as seen on the upcoming Nvidia Project Shield portable games console.

While it may seem out of this world that a mobile phone chip may have the GPU processing power of a games console, the PS3 and Xbox 360 are positively archaic when it comes to graphics technology with them both sporting chips capable of around 200GFLOPs, which compares to the 4500GFLOPS (4.5TFLOPS) of Nvidia’s latest flagship PC graphics card the GeForce Titan, or indeed the 1800GFLOPS (1.8TFLOPS) of the upcoming PS4.

In fact, it would ‘only’ take a doubling of current performance to get very close to this 200GFLOPS mark, with Nvidia’s current flagship mobile chip, Tegra 4, already running at 80GLOPS. And at the current rate of mobile processor advancement this doubling would be far from remarkable – after all, the previous generation, Tegra 3, runs at a mere 12 GLFOPS.

What’s more chip design and manufacturing processes have moved on such that the power hit from that level of performance isn’t anything like what it used to be so use in portable devices is viable.

However, while it is possible for a mobile processor to have this horsepower in the not too distant future, it’s not necessarily the case that we’ll see the technology on mobile phones as, even with all the recent enhancements in power consumption reduction, a chip that runs at circa 200GFLOPs is still going to drain a mobile phone size battery very rapidly. Nonetheless, we could certainly see tablets using the device and of course the next generation of Shield (which Nvidia confirmed will be upgraded every year with the latest Tegra chip) will be powered by such a chip – a prospect that certainly piques our interest.

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Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa, the eight-core processor at the heart of the Galaxy S4, will hit the open market in summer, the company has confirmed.

Samsung has confirmed plans to bring its Exynos 5 Octa eight-core processor to third-party companies by the end of the second quarter, heralding a potential boom in high-performance, high-resolution mobile devices and more.

Originally announced back in January, the Exynos 5 Octa is the chip behind the freshly-announced Samsung Galaxy S4 – in some markets, at least. Based on a design principle put forward by Cambridge-based chip design giant ARM known as big.LITTLE, the processor pairs four high-performance Cortex-A15 processing cores – the same as found in other Exynos 5 parts – with four lower-power Cortex-A7 cores. The result is, by the numbers, an eight-core chip – but the idea is to have only one quartet of cores running at any given time.

The design is ARM’s mean of addressing the two biggest demands in the mobile device world: increased processing power and increased battery life. As developers demand more horsepower from smartphones and tablets, the power required by the processor rises; but to get an appreciable increase in battery life, processors need to be designed to draw less power.

It’s a puzzle that big.LITTLE addresses by running the phone on the four low-power cores during non-intensive tasks, such as web browsing, making calls, listening to music or playing back a video. Designed as low-leakage parts, the Cortex-A7 chips don’t offer anywhere near the performance of ARM’s latest Cortex-A15 design – but they also don’t draw nearly as much power. When the phone or tablet switches into a high-demand situation, such as the launch of a game, the Cortex-A15 cores are powered up and all running tasks shunted across before the Cortex-A7 cores are powered down. When their grunt is no longer required, everything is shuffled back to the Cortex-A7 cores so the battery-draining Cortex-A15 cores can be put back to sleep.

It’s far from the first such attempt to pair special low-power cores with more powerful parts in the name of energy efficiency: Nvidia’s last-generation Tegra 3 and current-generation Tegra 4 pack a single-core processor designed to handling background tasks in the hope that the four main cores can spend much of their time powered down. Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa, however, will be the first to market with a full quad-core implementation of ARM’s big.LITTLE.

Currently, the chip is exclusive to Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone, although rumours suggest the upcoming Galaxy Note 3 will also include the Exynos 5 Octa. As with previous Exynos chips, Samsung won’t be keeping the device to itself but offering the part to other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) as part of its chipmaking business.

Thus far, Samsung hasn’t named any potential customers – but with the Exynos 5 Octa being the first sort-of-eight-core processor for the tablet and smartphone market, it’s likely numerous manufacturers will be jumping on the bandwagon and adopting the design. That also means that, potentially as soon as by the end of the year, we’re likely to see high-resolution, high-performance tablets powered by the chip, which is capable of driving display resolutions up to 2,650×1,600 (WXGA.) The chip is also likely to find favour with single-board computer manufacturers, who are likely to attempt to run all eight cores simultaneously for low-power high-throughput parallel processing tasks.

Sadly, all of this remains in the future – and if you want to play with the Exynos 5 Octa now, you’re going to have to join the queue for a Galaxy S4.

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Austin, Texas (CNN) — Julie Uhrman needed $950,000 from Kickstarter in less than a month to make her dream of an affordable, free-to-play gaming console a reality.

She got it in eight hours — and nearly $8 million more after that.

“It was the opposite of ‘Field of Dreams,’ ” said Uhrman, a gaming-industry veteran and former vice president at IGN. “It was, if you come, we will build this.”

And so was born Ouya, a $99 console that’s shaped like and is just a hair bigger than a Rubik’s Cube. It runs on Google’s Android operating system and requires developers to offer a version of their games for free.

Kickstarter backers will be getting their Ouyas later this month and they’ll go on sale to everyone else in June.

Speaking here at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, Uhrman said she got the idea for Ouya (pronounced OOO-yuh) in response to a video-game industry that to her had grown stale.

No new consoles were announced at last year’s E3 gaming conference by the big three console makers (Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony). In recent years, almost all the most hyped and popular games have been sequels. And the rise of mobile gaming has been limited, turning video gaming into a solitary exercise rather than the social one she remembered growing up.

“The TV is the best screen for playing games,” Uhrman said in an interview-style keynote with editor Joshua Topolsky of tech blog The Verge. “I remember growing up, playing with my sister … I feel like we’ve lost that. I want to bring back the world of TV gaming.”

For gamers, the strength of a console often boils down to the games they can play on it. To that end, Uhrman said 7,000 developers have signed up for Ouya accounts, from big publishers who create multi-million-selling titles like “Halo” down to the smaller independents.

The only requirement, she says, is that the game must be free or offer a free trial before the player has to buy it. How the game will make money — whether it’s through ads, in-game purchases or sales after a free trial — is up to the developer.

“You shouldn’t have to pay so much money to try out a new game,” she said. “We believe that every single game you should try before you buy.”

During the hour-long interview, Topolsky pushed Uhrman on whether the Ouya, which will have 1GB of RAM and run on an Nvidia Tegra 3 chip, will be powerful enough to run the kind of immersive, expansive shooters that have made big gaming releases as lucrative as blockbuster movies.

Her answer came in two parts.

“Yes,” she said. “And why would we?

“Those experiences are great on those devices. You wouldn’t want to play those games anywhere else. But we are going to have exclusive games. … We’re going to have inventive, creative, exciting content that no one else has. At $99, it’s not an either-or decision.”

Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/12/tech/gaming-gadgets/ouya-julie-uhrman-sxsw/index.html?eref=edition

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Ouya’s many backers, who helped give the console project a massive $8.6 million cash pile to develop the device, have been promised their devices by the end of the month.

The team behind the Ouya, a compact ARM-based microconsole running Google’s Android mobile operating system, has announced that the device will begin shipping to backers by the end of the month.

The Ouya console, which packs a mobile-centric Nvidia Tegra 3 low-power ARM chip and 1GB of RAM into a miniature casing designed to stream cloud-based games via troubled specialist OnLive as well as play locally-rendered casual gaming titles, launched on crowd-funding service Kickstarter with an eye-catching promise: an impressive games console for just $99. The low price and support of numerous industry luminaries who pledged ports and exclusives for the platform won it rapid support, smashing past its original $950,000 funding goal and finishing with a whopping $8.6 million in the bank – minus Kickstarter’s commission, of course.

The timing of the Kickstarter launch was undeniably lucky: the project’s page was filled with ‘concept’ imagery, showing artists’ impressions of what the device, its controller and even the central user interface could look like were the team to receive enough funding. Since then, Kickstarter has banned product renders and other concept images, demanding that hardware projects be more open and honest by showing actual prototype hardware to prospective buyers.

The news early last month that the Ouya console would receive annual hardware updates in a reflection of the rapidly-changing smartphone and tablet markets, with which the device has considerably more in common than an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, shocked some – and none more so than those who had contributed to the project’s success by pledging $99 or more to pre-order the device and had yet to receive any hardware for their hard-earned cash.

Worry not, the company has announced: the devices are on their way. In the 19th project update posted to Kickstarter late last night, the team behind the console promised that production is under way and shipping will begin on the 28th of March. Production volumes have not been confirmed, but the team promises that ‘tens of thousands‘ of its pre-order customers will get their devices by the end of the month, while a planned retail launch in June that will see the console hit bricks-and-mortar shop shelves is still on-track.

The team also offered a few more details about the games early adopters can expect, including a deal with Portal and Left 4 Dead co-creator Kim Swift to create an Ouya-exclusive title, a port of first-person puzzle shooter The Ball from Tripwire Interactive, and action-RGP ChronoBlade also making an appearance in the near future.

Whether Ouya’s console can succeed against smartphones and tablets with similar specifications – not to mention Nvidia’s upcoming Android-powered Shield hand-held – once the hype of its crowd-funded production has died away, however, remains to be seen.

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Nvidia’s record profits are helped by serious growth in its Tegra business, but gaming remains an important part of the company’s outlook – with founder Jen-Hsun Huang having particular praise for free-to-play titles.

Nvidia’s latest financial figures are out, and if the global market is in a slump somebody forgot to tell the green camp: the company has shown impressive growth, but it’s not in the PC market.

According to the company’s quarterly earnings report, published late yesterday, its year-on-year revenue has hit a record high of $4.28 billion – 7.1 per cent up on last year’s figures – despite a dip quarter-on-quarter that saw it end the year on a 8.1 per cent sequential slump. The company’s quarterly net profit figure is the stand-out headliner, however, growing 50 per cent year-on-year to $174 million – despite a stock repurchase programme that saw the company spending $100 million in the last financial quarter and a further $46.9 million in dividends to shareholders, resulting in a dip from Q3′s $209 million profit figure.

Nvidia’s secret to riding out the flagging PC market is, if you hadn’t guessed, Tegra. The company’s system-on-chip processor division, responsible for one of the most popular chips for Android – and, more recently, Windows RT – tablets, grew its revenue 50 per cent in 2012 hitting a high of $540 million. While that’s only a small fraction of the company’s entire $4.28 billion turnover for the year, that figure is only likely to grow further in the coming years. Nvidia’s GPU division, meanwhile, continues to dominate Nvidia’s earnings, pulling in $3.2 billion in revenue for the financial year.

Speaking in an earnings call with press and analysts, Nvidia co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang was clear about his company’s focus on growing its Tegra platform to account for a larger proportion of the company’s revenue – a plan which, he claims, is going well. ‘At this point we have more design wins [with Tegra 4] than we had at this point with Tegra 3,‘ Huang claims. ‘You also heard we are now sampling our 4G LTE modem, and this is a pretty large market. It’s still early in the overall modem market. It’s about 150 million units large, projected this year, [and] growing about 50% per year. The overall connected device market is probably about one billion, north of a billion units.

‘So there is a lot of LTE 4G modems that need to be shipped. And this is really the first year where we have the ability to engage the market. So we are really super excited about it. We are going to engage it very very hard. And we are sampling modems around the world now. And so those are good growth indicators for Tegra 4. In the first quarter, always we ramp down Tegra 3 as we ramp up Tegra 4. And hopefully in the future as we get more and more into lower-end devices where the lifecycle is a little longer, this transitional effect would be less pronounced. But this is something we expected and is something that will transition into Tegra 4 as fast as we can.’

With Tegra 4 expected to ship in volume in July this year, Huang was doing his best to push the technology ahead of rival devices from ARM’s other licensees, like Qualcomm’s currently-shipping Snapdragon S4 Pro or Samsung’s upcoming eight-core Exynos Octa. ‘[Soon] you will see performance evaluations of Tegra 4, and I think you’ll be quite pleased with them. Tegra 4 is many times higher performance than Tegra 3 in many areas and it’s designed to be very high performance. There’s a lot of confidence in why we can deliver that performance leadership. We said that about Tegra 3 and I think we delivered on that. This is an area that we’re quite good at. So, whether it’s CPU performance or GPU performance or camera performance, these are three areas that we’ve made big breakthroughs on.‘

That’s not to say Nvidia is moving away from graphics, of course. During the call, Huang described Kepler as ‘the best GPU we’ve ever built – the best GPU the industry has ever built,‘ promising to bring the same chipset to its Quadro workstation line as quickly as possible. As for its consumer line, Huang claimed that the explosion in free-to-play titles will help drive growth there too: ‘We have always said that PC gaming is vibrant. We have said that PC gaming is in fact growing, and the reason for that is because the PC platform is open and it allows for a lot of innovation, not only for technology but also for business models.

‘One of the most important new growth dynamic has to do with free to play. Free to play is really a wonderful business model. So ,these free to play platforms are fabulous for PCs – and it attracts new gamers.’

Naturally, nobody at Nvidia would be pushed on unannounced products or next-generation release schedules, but from the company’s financials the future certainly looks bright.

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The Surface RT (left) and the Surface Pro.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

With the Surface Pro set to go on sale Saturday, consumers will have a pretty stark choice between two Microsoft tablets that look remarkably similar.

When I walked into my local Los Angeles Microsoft Store earlier this week — where the Pro was already on display next to the RT model — it was hard to tell right off the bat which Surface was which.

Not surprising, since both
tablets display the same Metro screen and there’s a mere 4.2mm difference in thickness.

So, let’s recap what sets the Pro apart from the RT version.

Price: The RT model with
Microsoft Office starts at $499. The Pro without Microsoft Office starts at $899.

Compatibility: The RT model is not compatible with older Windows applications. The Pro is.

Thickness/weight: The Pro model is about 0.5 inches and 2 pounds, the RT model about 0.35 inches and 1.5 pounds.

Disk space/storage tech: The Pro comes in 64GB and 128GB versions, RT in 32GB and 64GB. Note that the
Surface Pro‘s solid-state drive is fast, the same class of speedy SSDs you find in mainstream laptops.

And there was a lot of confusion this week about the Pro’s available disk space, forcing Microsoft to correct itself. The company originally said (in a statement sent to the media) that the Pro had only 23GB available for the user on the 64GB model and 83GB free on the 128GB model. On Wednesday, Microsoft issued an erratum of sorts, upping the available space to 30GB and 90GB, respectively. And if you get rid of the recovery partition, you can retrieve even more disk space.

Battery life: Big difference here. While the Pro gets between 4 and 5 hours, RT gets about twice that.

Processor: Night and day in this case too. The Pro packs a powerful Intel Ivy Bridge chip, the RT a considerably slower Nvidia Tegra 3.

Display: The Pro has a killer 1,920×1,080 display, RT a pedestrian 1,366×768 resolution. Both are 10.6 inches.

In summary, with RT you’re getting a tablet, with the Pro you’re getting an ultrabook squeezed into a tablet. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

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Ouya’s Android-based console will be available for $99.99.

(Credit:
Ouya)

Ouya’s console will be updated each year with new and better components, the company’s founder and CEO said earlier today on the sidelines of the DICE Summit.

Speaking to The Verge in an interview published today, Ouya chief Julie Uhrman said that starting next year and every year thereafter, the company will bundle the most powerful mobile processors available in its console.

“Our plan is to have a yearly refresh of Ouya where we leverage the best-performing chips and take advantage of falling component prices to create the best experience we can at the $99 price point,” Uhrman told The Verge.

Ouya’s console, which was opened up for preorders earlier this week and hits wide retail availability in June, is running the Tegra 3 processor. However, the Tegra 4 is right around the corner. Each year, new and better processors are made available, and the console’s
Android-based gaming could do well with better chips.

That said, the console market is notorious for its lack of major annual upgrades. Console makers Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, tend to not update their products for several years. The
Wii U, for example, launched last year — six years after its predecessor, the
Wii, launched.

Game consoles require such lengthy refresh cycles because of the proprietary development requirements that go into making a game for those products. Ouya, however, is based on Android, making it much easier for developers to port titles to the hardware.

For now, gamers can start preordering the Ouya console online. Kickstarter backers who helped get Ouya off the ground will get the console in March. Buyers from the Ouya Web site will get the device in April. Those who wait to buy it at retail or preorder it from a major retailer will get the device in June. The console will be available for $99.99. An extra controller will set customers back $49.99.

An extra Ouya controller will cost $49.99.

(Credit:
Ouya)

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The Ouya console will be followed by a successor next year, and each year thereafter, as the company adopts smartphone market methodologies.

Ouya, the cut-price Android-based games console that smashed records when it launched on the Kickstarter crowd-funding platform – raising a whopping $8.6 million from its original goal of $950,000 – will be the first in a regular series of devices, the company has revealed.

At its heart, the Ouya is an Android tablet minus the display: the compact box packs an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor running at 1.6GHz with 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and an HDMI port supporting 1080p HD video and 5.1 digital surround-sound outputs. 802.11/g/b/n Wi-Fi is included along with a wired Ethernet port, while a Bluetooth radio connects the wireless controller and a micro-USB port allows for development, debugging and side-loading of apps and games.

If that sounds a little weedy for a console, that doesn’t appear to have stopped developers announcing their plans to support the device. Numerous companies have come forward with announcements that they will be launching games on the gadget, with Double Fine’s latest title Reds using the Ouya as its exclusive console launch platform. Troubled cloud gaming company OnLive has also announced its support for the console via its game streaming technology – little surprise, given that OnLive already has an Android app that will need little tweaking before release.

When you’re launching as a $99 console using the same kind of hardware you’d find in a high-end – or, given it’s a last-generation Tegra 3 chip and just 1GB of RAM, mid-range – smartphone, you can’t expect the five-year-plus lifecycles of the big boys, though. Even so, the company’s proclamation that it’s planning an annual release cycle is likely to come as something of a shock to those who have already parted with their cash for pre-orders of the first generation units.

In an interview with Engadget, company chief executive Julie Uhrman explained that Ouya would be following the same development cycle as the smartphone and tablet market, rather than that of rival consoles. ‘There will be a new Ouya every year‘ Uhrman admitted. ‘There will be an Ouya 2 and an Ouya 3.‘

That the tablet-inspired device should be following a tablet-inspired development schedule shouldn’t really come as a surprise, of course: when you’re packing the very latest hardware into a £400 games console, you can afford to over-spec the device and have it last for years to come; when you’re dealing with last-generation parts and a strict $99 retail price level, however, it’s time to take a different tack.

Uhrman was also keen to point out that existing games will not be lost: a game purchased on an Ouya 1 will work fine on an Ouya 2, an Ouya 3 and so forth. Each game is linked to a user’s account, much like titles purchased through Google Play – not supported by the Ouya, incidentally, in favour of its own bespoke marketplace – follow a user through multiple phone and tablet upgrades.

Initial indications are that the Ouya is proving popular with an impressive number of pre-orders, but how it will fare post-launch – and in the face of Nvidia’s own Tegra 4-based Project Shield gaming system – remains to be seen.

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