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Nvidia-Feature

Nvidia appear its quarterly earnings this calendar week, and the visitor posted record-breaking numbers in simply about every category. Revenue leapt 54% to merely over $two billion, the first time Nvidia has had a $2 billion quarter. Its gross margin gear up a tape at 59%, with a record 63% increase in gaming-derived acquirement. There'south no doubt about it: Nvidia's authority of the high-end GPU market is allowing information technology to suck down all of the spending that would normally accept been at to the lowest degree somewhat split between itself and AMD.

Gaming was the large revenue booster for Nvidia. Other sources, like Quadro, grew a pocket-size 9%, but nada like the leap that gaming GPUs saw. Information center revenue grew by 59% too, though this was much smaller in absolute terms ($230 million in data center sales, versus over $one billion in gaming revenue). Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, noted that he saw strong growth in AI, though he opted not to pause those figures out at this time. Nvidia's automotive programme is besides going well, with $127 million in revenue (a 61% increase yr-on-year) and a 7% increase sequentially.

Overall, Nvidia seems to have establish niches that fit information technology much better than the smartphone and tablet market. While the company enjoyed some solid success with Tegra two, Tegra iii wasn't a huge hit and the uptake for Tegra 4 and its following products was very pocket-sized. The Shield K1 is a great Android tablet (even if it's getting a bit long in the tooth). What Jen-Hsun talked nearly in the conference call is how Nvidia wants to build a computing platform that stretches from GPUs on the desktop, to cloud solutions like GRID, to automotive calculating and self-driving cars, to HPC. It's not that the rhetoric is different, only the fact that Nvidia is well on its style to doing it.

NV-Revenue

There are, of course, plenty of questions even so to exist answered. No i knows how rapidly self-driving cars will enter the market, AI and deep learning are still in their infancy, and the bulk of estimator systems congenital for HPC — at least, those on the TOP500 — still don't apply accelerators of whatever kind to ameliorate operation. Still, Nvidia is performing exceptionally well.

Any discussion of these trends inevitably raises the question of how and where AMD will offer competitive performance. Correct at present, we're in the doldrums as far every bit competing directly with Nvidia's high-finish. We've known this would exist the example until Vega launches, and I don't think AMD is somehow critically behind simply because it'll launch later on than its competitor. Fermi, after all, debuted nearly a twelvemonth later the Hard disk drive 5000 family. It as well took AMD most a yr to build a decent competitor to Nvidia's G80 dorsum in 2006, and nonetheless by 2008 the Hd 4000 series was offering strong competition against Nvidia.

What Nvidia has washed, that AMD doesn't seem to have an answer for, is differentiate its GPUs into a multifariousness of markets. OpenCL and HSA may be corking on paper, but uptake has been zilch. Three years after promising a version of Java that supported HSA and talking up multiple games and applications that would accept reward of Kaveri's benefits, the number of HSA apps in the market is very nearly nada.

AMD's Boltzmann initiative from last year was interesting and may be winning some small support, but the company needs to launch both Zen and Vega in the next few months. Based on their mutual operation, we'll take a much better idea how well-positioned AMD is to slug things out in the CPU and GPU marketplace. AMD's console wins are what's keeping the company live these days, but it needs to demonstrate stronger operation in PC gaming or other segments if it wants to accept on Team Dark-green across the entire reckoner industry.

What'due south particularly ironic about this, of course, is that later AMD appear that its futurity CPUs would actually integrate graphics fries, plenty of people idea this could be the end of Nvidia as a GPU manufacturer. Clearly, that's non what happened. And while yes, in that location accept been controversies in the gaming community about programs like GameWorks, Nvidia has done an excellent chore winning business and executing its strategies in markets that have cypher to practice with gaming or game functioning.