NVIDIA Announces Record Q3 FY 2017 Results

Today NVIDIA announced their fiscal earnings for the third quarter of their 2017 fiscal year (and yes, that’s not a typo). NVIDIA has cracked the $2 billion mark for quarterly revenue, with earnings of $2.004 billion this quarter. This is up an impressive 54% compared to the same quarter last year. This record revenue follows a previous record for Q2, and NVIDIA is forecasting revenue for next quarter of $2.1 billion, plus or minus two percent. With this rate of growth, they will easily surpass their best yearly earnings ever which was $5.01 billion announced in January 2016. They are on pace for close to $7 billion for the year, which is a dramatic increase at a time when the core PC market is in decline. Gross margin for this quarter was up 2.7% year-over-year to 59.0%, and operating income was up 161% to $639 million. Net income for the quarter was $542 million, up 120% over last year, and earnings per share came in at $0.83, up 89% year-over-year.

NVIDIA has done a decent job diversifying itself, but it’s core market is still consumer GPU sales. With the launch of Pascal, NVIDIA has maintained a very healthy performance lead, and that has certainly translated into sales. Gaming related sales for this quarter came in at a staggering $1.244 billion, up 63.5% compared to Q3 2016. NVIDIA gained more revenue in the gaming segment this quarter than all of AMD’s Computing and Graphics segment earned in their last quarter. Clearly there was some pent-up demand for the FinFET based GPUs after being on 28 nm for so long. Professional Visualization had a good quarter as well, with revenues of $207 million. That is a 9% increase year-over-year, although they did have a 3% drop in revenue compared to their previous quarter.

With the rise in GPU compute in the datacenter, NVIDIA has aggressively pursued this market, and it is starting to make some real inroads here as well. For Q3 2017, NVIDIA had revenue of $240 million in their Datacenter group, which is up from $82 million a year ago, or a 193% increase in revenue year-over-year. Datacenter revenue is now the second largest segment for NVIDIA, and only a year ago it was half of the professional GPU revenue.

Automotive continues to be a solid performer for NVIDIA too, and they’ve released quite a few SoCs specifically for this market. NVIDIA announced that it has an agreement to supply Tesla Motors the DRIVE PX 2 platform to power a new AutoPilot system in the Model S, X, and upcoming 3. With a maximum TDP of 250 Watts, DRIVE PX 2 casts off the mobile SoC constraints of the previous design, despite still having NVIDIA’s Denver CPU paired with Cortex-A57. With the continued investment in this sector, NVIDIA has seen strong growth here, and revenue for this quarter was $127 million, which is up from $79 million a year ago, or a gain of 60%.

Finally, OEM and IP had earnings of $186 million for the quarter, which is down slightly from the $193 million they earned a year ago, but with the recent announcement that they will power the Nintendo Switch, perhaps they will see some growth here in the future.

This entire year has been very good for NVIDIA, but this quarter in particular has seen some very strong growth. The best news for NVIDIA and their investors is that they are not just seeing growth in their diversified markets, although they are doing very well there, but the growth in their core market was incredibly strong as well.

Source: NVIDIA Investor Relations

Now Shipping: AMD Radeon Pro WX Series

Back in July AMD announced the Radeon Pro WX series. Part of a broader rebranding effort for AMD’s professional grade graphics cards – moving away from the FirePro brand and making everything part of the Radeon family – the WX series would also mark the first use of AMD’s latest-generation Polaris architecture in their pro cards. At the time of their announcement, AMD had not finalized the card specifications or launch date beyond Q4, but as of this week the cards are finally reaching AMD’s partners and retailers, and the final specifications are being released.

When AMD first announced these cards, they were targeting better than 2 TFLOPS, 4 TFLOPS, and 5 TFLOPS for the WX 4100, WX 5100, and WX 7100 respectively. The final specifications put the WX 7100 and WX 4100 ahead of that, at 5.7 and 2.4 TFLOPS. However the WX 5100 ended up coming up a bit short of AMD’s goal; it tops out at 3.9 TFLOPS.

Otherwise the cards have not significantly changed since AMD’s initial unveiling. Though along with the final specifications, we also have the final TBPs. The top-tier WX 7100 is rated for 130W, while the WX 5100 becomes AMD’s pro card of choice for 75W systems that don’t offer an external power connection. Finally the low-end WX 4100 is being rated at 50W. Meanwhile AMD is going for a single-wide cards across the entire family, something they also did with the 150W-and-below members of the previous-generation FirePro series.

Finally, when it comes to pricing AMD indicated that they’d continue to be very competitive with NVIDIA here, and the final prices reflect that. The WX 7100 will be hitting the market at $799, with the WX 5100 and WX 4100 bringing up the rear at $499 and $399 respectively. AMD has over the last couple of generations aimed to offer better performance-per-dollar than NVIDIA in this space, and the Radeon Pro WX series is continuing this tradition. The high-end WX 7100 and low-end WX 4100 will be available later this week on the 10^th, while the mid-range WX 5100 will hit the virtual shelves later next week on the 18^th.

Driver News: Quarterly Releases for Pro Drivers

Along with this week’s launch of the Radeon Pro WX series cards, AMD is also further clarifying their plans for software support of the new hardware. Even with the change in branding, the Radeon Pro WX series is still getting its own, separate enterprise driver release.

The biggest shift here is that AMD is now going to be releasing drivers on a set schedule; they will be releasing drivers quarterly, on the fourth Thursday of each quarter. In fact this new schedule is being applied to all AMD pro cards, including their existing FirePro cards, with their most recent driver release on October 27^th (driver 16.Q4) serving as the first release under this schedule. AMD hopes that by offering drivers on a fixed release schedule, they can strike a balance between updates and stability for pro users, giving pro users regular updates while avoiding the disarray that can come from unexpected driver releases.

AMD is also reiterating their focus on reliability and driver quality. Besides getting drivers certified by the usual parties in the pro application space – Autodesk, Adobe, Dassault Systèmes, etc – they are also doing their own internal testing, the idea being to exceed what their OEM partners are already doing. From a market share perspective AMD is still the underdog by a significant margin, so it’s important they show potential customers that they can meet or beat NVIDIA on support and reliability, as well as performance.

Gallery: Radeon Pro WX Series Launch Deck

ARM Announces Mali-G51 Mainstream GPU, Mali-V-61 Video Processing Block

These days ARM and its customers are in the midst of a major evolution in GPU design. Back in May the company announced their new Bifrost GPU architecture, a new and modern architecture for future GPUs. With Bifrost ARM would be taking a leap that we&…