Nvidia First Quarter Fiscal 2018 Financials - Higher Profits due to Nintendo Switch

Geez, they just keep getting stronger. Would love to see AMD as strong as that.

 

Pretty incredible results when you take into account that their core business market is shrinking.

And that's exactly why Nvidia has been a runaway success compared to AMD: Diversification, platforming and support.

Here is an example:
http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-train-100-000-developers-on-deep-learning-in-2017

These are the data scientists that will be working in the major corporations in the coming years, and guess which hardware and software platform they will be familiar with and request? Nvidia.

Nvidia's management deserves high praise for their foresight and their willingness to adapt. Their Tegra program had a good run until around Tegra 3, after which they pretty much had no clients for it. Now instead of what a lot of companies might have done and either closed it and/or sold off the pieces, they turned it around to be their Automotive and Console push, and have reaped the rewards in return instead of the losses. Their diversification into the datacenter also proved to be a runaway success.

And while they might have some of the best hardware around, what really drives their success is their focus on the software platforms surrounding their products.

 

Nvidia practically has a monopoly where their Graphic Card prices go up to the Sky. Regarding graphics card market these years, AMD/ATI can't get even close to Nvidia and therefore we have the "Golden Years" of Nvidia all thanks to AMD only.

 

not only, they have near monopole:

-In ProGPU (outside of some Hyped event AMD are always "aviable on demand" or "not aviable" for Pro).

-In car computer (they are the only one now exept some startup...).

 

There are multiple companies involved in car computing. Intel being a fairly large one especially now with their purchase of mobileye. Tesla has it's own hardware/software division and while they are currently using Nvidia hardware, they aren't using Nvidia's driving package - they can switch at any point. In fact Elon said that AMD was considered:

 

Yeah there is a reason they are Number 1 in the market, they must be doing something right! Ever since I got my Gtx 580 I never once looked back at amd radeon nor do I plan to.

 

Little off-topic;

Volvo auto-braking system!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_47utWAoupo

 

Intel will drive Mobileye to the ground, as prophesized. I don't believe that they can touch anything that NVIDIA will do there.

The only danger for NVIDIA in the car space is Jim Keller being the head of Tesla's hardware department, but it will take at least 3-4 years before anything comes to fruition there.

AMD is a current zero in that market, which is very weird considering that the traditional strengths of their architecture have been in compute performance and their experience with custom chips. I hope that Ryzen and Vega do well and that they manage to invest more in the software ecosystem which is the only place they seem to lack.

 

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla-and-nvidia.html

 

They have a PX2 for inferencing and a Titan X for training, but they don't use Nvidia's software.

https://electrek.co/2016/10/21/all-...-new-drive-px-2-ai-platform-for-self-driving/

 

Did you not read the article? How is their "core business" market shrinking when datacenters, mobile devices (including the Switch), and automotive are all getting more attention? If you think PC gamers are their core market, you're very mistaken. As with Intel, their main source of profits are not everyday at-home consumers.

The only additional profitable markets Nvidia has over AMD are machine learning, mobile, and automotive. Meanwhile, AMD has access to x86 and game consoles besides the Switch. Claiming Nvidia has better diversification and platforming may be true but an overstatement and not a reason for their runaway success.

Nvidia's success has more to do with more polished products, faster and more distinct evolution of their products, better marketing, and a fanbase loyal enough to fund stupidly high and arbitrarily priced Titans.

Do you not realize you contradicted yourself within the first 2 sentences? How can someone have good foresight when their product loses clients? But, what makes you think a product is losing clients when one of the main contributors to their boost in revenue was the Switch (which uses a Tegra chip)?

Even excluding the Switch, I would argue the Tegra program is fantastic and exciting. I strongly approve of Nvidia's work put into it. If they were priced better, I'd be buying into their Jetson platforms ASAP.

Nvidia's software is excellent and may be attractive to consumers, but, it's also their downfall. Nvidia is extremely greedy with their IP, and as a result it greatly hinders their products. Just look at what happened to hardware-accelerated PhysX. With Vulkan released, people's interest in CUDA is also greatly threatened.

 

Intel sold very well even when they had crappy P4s to sell, it doesn't mean the products are better. Heck elections are won with good PR too even though the candidate(s) can be crap.

 

Good for them, good leadership and foresight (I wonder how much of this is due to Jensen Huang). And the fact that they also pretty much dominate in what made them big to begin with (GPUs), is another achievement.

 

Told ya AI is the sh1t.

Why is everyone still rallying behind VR and autonomous driving is beyond me.

PC graphics is the core of the core, and its shrinking in units shipped (OEMs, low end graphics), but in high-end and gaming is growing.

 

Because VR is fun, and autonomous driving could immensely improve the future of humanity in several different ways.

But the "core of the core" is not "the core". Intel's i3/i5/i7 models are the "core of the core" to their Xeon series, of which is "their core" market.

It doesn't matter if Nvidia's shipped units are shrinking; that doesn't correlate to their success.

 

GitS is coming true.

 

Or lead to 40%+ unemployment rates for an already shrinking middle class, without replacement in any other industry since AIs are effectively slaves and create the same economic problems they created in the Roman Empire and the American South.

I'm also not sure if I'm looking forward to a future that 80% of humanity will be eventually redundant except for genetic material. This is far away now, but that's where machine learning will take us. I'm not a Luddite, but I can't see us as a species handling this properly, and this time (unlike the Roman and Civil War times), there are nukes around and idiots like Trump who wield them. I love the tech, but I honestly believe we'll f*ck this up as a species.

As for Tesla, the only reason they went for NVIDIA GPUs was because the Titan XP was the fastest single GPU they could get for that workload. With the advent of Vega, that will most likely change. It would be interesting to see what they would have chosen if both top end cards would have been available.