This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Nvidia-Feature

Nvidia announced its quarterly earnings this week, and the company posted record-breaking numbers in just virtually every category. Revenue leapt 54% to just over $2 billion, the first time Nvidia has had a $two billion quarter. Its gross margin prepare a record at 59%, with a record 63% increase in gaming-derived revenue. There's no uncertainty nigh it: Nvidia's potency of the high-cease GPU market is assuasive it to suck down all of the spending that would normally take been at least somewhat divide betwixt itself and AMD.

Gaming was the large revenue booster for Nvidia. Other sources, similar Quadro, grew a pocket-sized nine%, just nix like the jump that gaming GPUs saw. Data middle acquirement grew past 59% as well, though this was much smaller in absolute terms ($230 million in data eye sales, versus over $ane billion in gaming revenue). Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, noted that he saw strong growth in AI, though he opted non to break those figures out at this fourth dimension. Nvidia's automotive plan is as well going well, with $127 million in revenue (a 61% increase yr-on-year) and a 7% increase sequentially.

Overall, Nvidia seems to take plant niches that fit information technology much better than the smartphone and tablet marketplace. While the company enjoyed some solid success with Tegra 2, Tegra three wasn't a huge hit and the uptake for Tegra 4 and its following products was very modest. The Shield K1 is a great Android tablet (fifty-fifty if it's getting a bit long in the tooth). What Jen-Hsun talked about in the conference call is how Nvidia wants to build a computing platform that stretches from GPUs on the desktop, to cloud solutions similar GRID, to automotive computing and self-driving cars, to HPC. It's non that the rhetoric is different, but the fact that Nvidia is well on its manner to doing it.

NV-Revenue

There are, of form, plenty of questions nevertheless to exist answered. No one knows how quickly self-driving cars will enter the market, AI and deep learning are still in their infancy, and the majority of computer systems built for HPC — at least, those on the TOP500 — still don't use accelerators of any kind to improve performance. However, Nvidia is performing exceptionally well.

Any discussion of these trends inevitably raises the question of how and where AMD will offer competitive functioning. Right now, we're in the doldrums as far every bit competing directly with Nvidia's high-end. We've known this would be the case until Vega launches, and I don't recollect AMD is somehow critically behind merely because it'll launch afterward than its competitor. Fermi, afterwards all, debuted near a year after the Hd 5000 family. It also took AMD nearly a twelvemonth to build a decent competitor to Nvidia's G80 back in 2006, and notwithstanding by 2008 the Hd 4000 series was offering strong competition confronting Nvidia.

What Nvidia has done, that AMD doesn't seem to take an reply for, is differentiate its GPUs into a variety of markets. OpenCL and HSA may be great on paper, but uptake has been nil. Three years afterward promising a version of Java that supported HSA and talking upwards multiple games and applications that would take advantage of Kaveri's benefits, the number of HSA apps in the marketplace is very virtually null.

AMD'south Boltzmann initiative from last twelvemonth was interesting and may be winning some small support, only the visitor needs to launch both Zen and Vega in the next few months. Based on their mutual operation, we'll have a much better idea how well-positioned AMD is to slug things out in the CPU and GPU market. AMD's panel wins are what's keeping the visitor live these days, but information technology needs to demonstrate stronger performance in PC gaming or other segments if information technology wants to have on Team Green across the entire computer manufacture.

What's especially ironic about this, of course, is that after AMD announced that its future CPUs would really integrate graphics chips, plenty of people idea this could be the terminate of Nvidia every bit a GPU manufacturer. Clearly, that's non what happened. And while yes, in that location have been controversies in the gaming customs about programs like GameWorks, Nvidia has done an excellent job winning business and executing its strategies in markets that have nothing to do with gaming or game performance.