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Monday, October 16, 2017

Ambarella Loses Key Customers

The Motley Fool publishes an analysis of Ambarella performance over the last year. The company lost some of its key customers GoPro, Hikvision and DJI, while the new Google Clips camera opted for non-Ambarella processor as well:

"Faced with shrinking margins, GoPro needed to buy cheaper chipsets to cut costs. It also wanted a custom design which wasn't readily available to competitors like Ambarella's SoCs. That's why it completely cut Ambarella out of the loop and hired Japanese chipmaker Socionext to create a custom GP1 SoC for its new Hero 6 cameras.

DJI also recently revealed that its portable Spark drone didn't use an Ambarella chipset. Instead, the drone uses the Myriad 2 VPU (visual processing unit) from Intel's Movidius. DJI previously used the Myriad 2 alongside an Ambarella chipset in its flagship Phantom 4, but the Spark uses the Myriad 2 for both computer vision and image processing tasks.

Google also installed the Myriad 2 in its Clips camera, which automatically takes burst shots by learning and recognizing the faces in a user's life.

Ambarella needs the CV1 to catch up to the Myriad 2, but that could be tough with the Myriad's first-mover's advantage and Intel's superior scale.

To top it all off, Chinese chipmakers are putting pressure on Ambarella's security camera business in China.
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2 comments:

  1. Don't underestimate the inherent talent of Intel to acquire a company and kill off it's momentum. Ambarella has some sharp folks and is not down and out just yet. There will be a few more dice rolls in this game.

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  2. Not surprised, Ambarella has support problems on top of buggy silicon and lacks determination to tap dashcam market.

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