You know that R&D budget is rather diverse and not all of it is hardware, also Pascal R&D would also includes the massive amount spent on auto/Tegra X2/etc.Thanks Steven, those numbers were about 2x above my expectations aswell. I guess it goes to show how Nvidia has been dominating the HPC accelerator market.
So in the whole of 2016, gaming revenue was a total of 2818 M $ and HPC was 339 M $, so that would constitute about 12.02 % of the gaming revenue.
This is definitely not peanuts to Nvidia as I previously stated!
Now, given that the Pascal architecture cost something like 2500 M $ in RnD* to develop, it would take the Tesla/HPC segment about 7 years to accumulate that sort of revenue (less if growing trend continues), do you think Nvidia can afford to build an architecture specifically for HPC only? No, of course not.
HPC is still riding piggyback, maybe this will change with the surge of deep learning applications? It looks to be a huge new market.
* I was told this number by nvidia architecture chief, is there a better official number?
But even then it does not matter because all sales segments-markets profit (this comes down to margins) contributes to R&D even if it is different HW.
Also part of this is building for the future, the value of HPC-ML-auto is meant to be massive but time will tell.
To see how well HPC and ML influences growth and revenue you need to watch it from Q3 FY16 onwards, due to the various projects coming on-line or new ones signed since P100 released.
Also do not forget profit margin.
The GP102 is $1200 (and trend shows only around 1% goes to consumer), the cheapest PCIE GP100 card is around $5,300 and the largest projects can be direct sales (meaning all margins go to Nvidia and none shared with sales channel partners/integrators such as Cray).
So factor that in your revenue, especially as even the higher profit margin gaming cards only have a consumer demograph of 0.8% to 1% each historically; that is the 980 and 980ti and also Titan X.
So greatest revenue in gaming is from the lower margin models while net profit between segments would be much closer.
The interesting slide would be profit for each segment-market.
Just from a HW context it could be seen HPC generates 3x to 4x more profit margin (yeah generalising not usually a good idea I agree but it is going to be high), but this is made more complex by 'soft costs' of software, which is applicable to both HPC-ML and gaming in different ways but optimisation-API-libraries-coding teams exist in each.
Cheers
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