eh, NVIDIA profit triples
- Thread starter ben6
- Start date
Anybody listen to the call yet? Hoping for a G70 tidbit or two.
Edit: Still going on, actually. Just heard Jen basically say that if you ain't got SLI you ain't performance. Going on about how much bigger the market is for SLI than anyone thought it was.
Also claiming 1m sli chipsets sold, but still trying to figure out how many of those really are two-gpu systems.
I'll try to listen to the whole thing later and provide some quotes, if someone else doesn't beat me to it.
Edit: Still going on, actually. Just heard Jen basically say that if you ain't got SLI you ain't performance. Going on about how much bigger the market is for SLI than anyone thought it was.
Also claiming 1m sli chipsets sold, but still trying to figure out how many of those really are two-gpu systems.
I'll try to listen to the whole thing later and provide some quotes, if someone else doesn't beat me to it.
rendezvous
Regular
* Next gen GPU may be sighted in next week.
* Chipsets with integrated graphics are sampling.
* Chipsets with integrated graphics are sampling.
Front page.
NV Conf Call 5/12/2005
Some highlights, no doubt idiosyncratically selected, and accuracy is worth what you paid for it (tho I tried my best while multi-tasking):
Jen:
General chest-pounding near “Tarzan yell†levels. Very pleased.
“SLI becoming must have featureâ€. Cites PC Mag and 3DM orb.
Very happy with Nforce.
SLI major growth driver for them.
CFO:
Workstations a leader in revenue growth this quarter.
$13m in revenue from Sony this quarter.
Handheld revenue took a dive. Single customer (Motorola) to blame.
GF6 more than 2/3rds of GPU revenue.
50% margin on the Sony revenue from the quarter.
Have stopped production of Xbox. MS won’t take any more deliveries after this next quarter.
Jen:
“We believe the GPU will become the DSP of the 21st centuryâ€.
GF6 SM3.0 “a full year ahead of the competitionâ€. “Strong move to SM3.0 [amongst developers] has happened.â€
“SLI is one of our best inventions.†“Our success is the result of the culmination of nearly three years of effort.â€
Year over year share of DX9 performance increased 21% to 70% according to Mercury.
Workstations and Nforce all is beautiful. Only NV could have lead SLI back to the market due to nforce.
Lots of opportunity in handhelds. Seems to agree with Gates that the mobile phone will kill dedicated mp3 players over time.
“Days away from the beginning of one of the most exciting eras in video game history. The amount of technology we’re developing is nothing short of astounding.†PS3 gpu will have more transistors than all three of the current console generation cpus & gpus combined.
Q&A with Jen:
Expects great growth in workstation, particularly advertising production.
[I didn’t know this] NV bundles high-end memory with some high-end GPU sales to make sure availability is there for their board partners. They don’t like to do it, and stop as soon as they can (i.e. when availability is more reliable). [Context was low revenue from memory sales is a *good* thing from their pov]
[CFO] Substantial benefit to margins in transition from GFX to GF6.
With integrated graphics, necessary to become a world-class chipset provider first to be successful. Integration of the gpu to the chipset is “trivial†once you have worldclass chipset. Sampling first IG chipset in awhile now.
“PS3 is going to be all gross margins for us.†(which doesn’t quite fit the earlier report, but maybe he meant going forward. Or maybe the Finance boys –in fact, they probably do—assign some corporate overhead to those revenues, proportionally)
Shipped 1m sli chipsets.
Ramping Intel sli this quarter.
Request to bring sli to mainstream presented to them several times. They are thinking about it.
Technology license payments from Sony starts Q3. IP revenue will end this year.
Intel chipset market ramping “don’t knowâ€, being somewhat conservative but optimistic.
SLI is “really uncontested†in the marketplace. They expect to keep capturing more of high-end.
PCIE transition slower than they anticipated. 6200 agp doing very well in the marketplace.
“We do have a next generation gpu and we are really excited about it. And maybe next week you might get a sighting of it at E3.â€
Q: Tier 1 oems going to sli?
A: “Performance segment requires sli now. Not a single performance desktop pc will be called a ‘performance desktop pc’ without sli. It’s impossible. It will lose every benchmark. And so by definition sli is required for high-end pcs. So it just depends on whether oems are interested in high-end pcs or not.â€
“The game enthusiast market is quite large. Its larger than most people ever estimated it to be, and it continues to grow.†Sli “mandatory feature†for those folks. Cites PC Mag and says you won’t even be considered a performance pc without sli.
Q: Two-gpu “attach rate†for sli chipsets?
A: Trying to figure it out. Not enough data. Severe supply pressure on their gpus in their opinion due to double gpu sli attach rate. “Clear now SLI is going to be a going on feature for some time. This is not a one time thing.â€
Q: AFR and identical boards only way to go?
A: Not a fan of mixing/matching due to fear of consumer confusion this early in this new market. Concerned poor kid at Fry’s won’t know what to buy to be successful in building his new multi-gpu system. [didn’t address AFR]
Not too interested in low/mid laptop market. Top 1/3 of laptop market is their target.
Some highlights, no doubt idiosyncratically selected, and accuracy is worth what you paid for it (tho I tried my best while multi-tasking):
Jen:
General chest-pounding near “Tarzan yell†levels. Very pleased.
“SLI becoming must have featureâ€. Cites PC Mag and 3DM orb.
Very happy with Nforce.
SLI major growth driver for them.
CFO:
Workstations a leader in revenue growth this quarter.
$13m in revenue from Sony this quarter.
Handheld revenue took a dive. Single customer (Motorola) to blame.
GF6 more than 2/3rds of GPU revenue.
50% margin on the Sony revenue from the quarter.
Have stopped production of Xbox. MS won’t take any more deliveries after this next quarter.
Jen:
“We believe the GPU will become the DSP of the 21st centuryâ€.
GF6 SM3.0 “a full year ahead of the competitionâ€. “Strong move to SM3.0 [amongst developers] has happened.â€
“SLI is one of our best inventions.†“Our success is the result of the culmination of nearly three years of effort.â€
Year over year share of DX9 performance increased 21% to 70% according to Mercury.
Workstations and Nforce all is beautiful. Only NV could have lead SLI back to the market due to nforce.
Lots of opportunity in handhelds. Seems to agree with Gates that the mobile phone will kill dedicated mp3 players over time.
“Days away from the beginning of one of the most exciting eras in video game history. The amount of technology we’re developing is nothing short of astounding.†PS3 gpu will have more transistors than all three of the current console generation cpus & gpus combined.
Q&A with Jen:
Expects great growth in workstation, particularly advertising production.
[I didn’t know this] NV bundles high-end memory with some high-end GPU sales to make sure availability is there for their board partners. They don’t like to do it, and stop as soon as they can (i.e. when availability is more reliable). [Context was low revenue from memory sales is a *good* thing from their pov]
[CFO] Substantial benefit to margins in transition from GFX to GF6.
With integrated graphics, necessary to become a world-class chipset provider first to be successful. Integration of the gpu to the chipset is “trivial†once you have worldclass chipset. Sampling first IG chipset in awhile now.
“PS3 is going to be all gross margins for us.†(which doesn’t quite fit the earlier report, but maybe he meant going forward. Or maybe the Finance boys –in fact, they probably do—assign some corporate overhead to those revenues, proportionally)
Shipped 1m sli chipsets.
Ramping Intel sli this quarter.
Request to bring sli to mainstream presented to them several times. They are thinking about it.
Technology license payments from Sony starts Q3. IP revenue will end this year.
Intel chipset market ramping “don’t knowâ€, being somewhat conservative but optimistic.
SLI is “really uncontested†in the marketplace. They expect to keep capturing more of high-end.
PCIE transition slower than they anticipated. 6200 agp doing very well in the marketplace.
“We do have a next generation gpu and we are really excited about it. And maybe next week you might get a sighting of it at E3.â€
Q: Tier 1 oems going to sli?
A: “Performance segment requires sli now. Not a single performance desktop pc will be called a ‘performance desktop pc’ without sli. It’s impossible. It will lose every benchmark. And so by definition sli is required for high-end pcs. So it just depends on whether oems are interested in high-end pcs or not.â€
“The game enthusiast market is quite large. Its larger than most people ever estimated it to be, and it continues to grow.†Sli “mandatory feature†for those folks. Cites PC Mag and says you won’t even be considered a performance pc without sli.
Q: Two-gpu “attach rate†for sli chipsets?
A: Trying to figure it out. Not enough data. Severe supply pressure on their gpus in their opinion due to double gpu sli attach rate. “Clear now SLI is going to be a going on feature for some time. This is not a one time thing.â€
Q: AFR and identical boards only way to go?
A: Not a fan of mixing/matching due to fear of consumer confusion this early in this new market. Concerned poor kid at Fry’s won’t know what to buy to be successful in building his new multi-gpu system. [didn’t address AFR]
Not too interested in low/mid laptop market. Top 1/3 of laptop market is their target.
Jawed
Legend
Well PS3 GPU might only need to be about 200 million transistors if it only rasterises triangles, shades pixels and does ROP, leaving geometry to Cell.
The biggest constraint with a console has got to be heat. 90nm will help loads.
Having said that, the NV42 (190 million transistors at 110nm - 12 pipes, admittedly) performs really very well in a Dell XPS II laptop, so the heat can be dealt with in a fairly small case.
Jawed
The biggest constraint with a console has got to be heat. 90nm will help loads.
Having said that, the NV42 (190 million transistors at 110nm - 12 pipes, admittedly) performs really very well in a Dell XPS II laptop, so the heat can be dealt with in a fairly small case.
Jawed
The PS3 GPU is called RSX, and apparently it packs "two teraflops of floating point horsepower" in 300M transistors.
geo, you may have misheard Jen-Hsun slightly, as it appears he said RSX had more transistors than the GPU and CPU of all three current consoles. Or maybe he mispoke during the call and got the marketing right for the in-person launch.
Anyway, sounds big. I'm off to read Anandtech's write-up. Maybe it'll shed some light on how nV defines FP "horsepower," if they're still using distinct shaders, and whether nV decided to forego EDRAM (I'm guessing yes for the last two).
geo, you may have misheard Jen-Hsun slightly, as it appears he said RSX had more transistors than the GPU and CPU of all three current consoles. Or maybe he mispoke during the call and got the marketing right for the in-person launch.
Anyway, sounds big. I'm off to read Anandtech's write-up. Maybe it'll shed some light on how nV defines FP "horsepower," if they're still using distinct shaders, and whether nV decided to forego EDRAM (I'm guessing yes for the last two).
Pete said:geo, you may have misheard Jen-Hsun slightly, as it appears he said RSX had more transistors than the GPU and CPU of all three current consoles. Or maybe he mispoke during the call and got the marketing right for the in-person launch.
Err, I think I said that. I certainly intended to say that. Looking at it again in my post I still think I said that.
But if I didn't, I'll still sign up for your formulation as consistent with what I heard Jen say in the call.
Curse my synapses of misremembrance! Quite obviously you said that, but for some reason I miscombined Zoinks' calculations and those presented at the PS3 launch, which added an FX 55 to reach 300M.
Your courtesy is duly appreciated, but be aware I may misremember it as rudeness in a future post.
Your courtesy is duly appreciated, but be aware I may misremember it as rudeness in a future post.
