PC sales suddenly tanked this quarter, so Nvidia, like Intel, is suddenly underneath the gun. So what are you running to do about the billions of dollars of growth that went up in smoke, investors tend to request?
But while that’s an irritating situation for Nvidia during today’s Q2 earnings, it’s intriguing for gamers like you and me — because Nvidia endeavored to placate those investors by revealing that exciting things may be on the way.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated what we’ve suspected for months: Nvidia built too many gaming GPUs and is now being pushed to sell them for less money. “We saw ourselves with excess inventory,” says Huang. “The strategy is to sell in well below the recent sell-through levels in the marketplace to allow the channel to correct.”
“We’ve enforced programs with the partners to price-position the product in the channel in practice for our next generation,” he said on the call.
To market as many RTX 3000 graphics cards and chips as possible before the RTX 4000 series arrives this fall, it’s cutting prices — to distributors.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll immediately see a too-good-to-be-true price on a graphics card or gaming laptop because the final price is up to partners and retailers. But those parties have incentives to clear shelves, even if they disguise them as sales rather than across-the-board price cuts. Either way, the trend is down, with some cards again emerging at MSRP after years of commanding 2-3x their price on eBay.
Nvidia is also endeavoring to signal that the current-gen Ampere GPUs will live with next-gen ones — Huang states current-gen GPUs will “be layered on top” of the “thrilling next generation” of chips. He also indicated that there might be a place for extra GPUs in cloud data centers: “we hear quite extensively that GPU supply is in shortage in the cloud.” So Nvidia may have other choices than merely clearing inventory of its GPUs by pricing them low.
Nvidia may have something totally different up its sleeves to improve its gaming revenue. Nvidia has “a new segment of the market that we plan to reach with our gaming technology,” she said on the call.
Your guess is as good as mine. My mind immediately goes to how AMD seems to be powering a new generation of high-performance handheld gaming PCs, years after Nvidia mostly gave up on that idea (though it did become the Nintendo Switch). It could just as quickly be a gaming-focused take on the metaverse.
Nvidia constantly insisted during today’s Q2 2022 earnings call that gaming demand hasn’t fallen off a ridge despite the sudden drop in revenue, indicating that GeForce sell-through is nonetheless up 70 percent since before the pandemic.
Nvidia Corporation, commonly understood as Nvidia, is an American multinational technology company incorporated in Delaware and established in Santa Clara, California. It is a software and a fabless corporation that develops application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science, graphics processing units (GPUs), and high-performance computing, as well as system-on chip units (SoCs) for mobile computing and the automotive demand.
Nvidia is a global head in artificial intelligence hardware and software. Its professional streak of GPUs is used in workstations for architecture, engineering and construction, media and entertainment, scientific research, automotive, and manufacturing design.
In addition to GPU manufacturing, Nvidia furnishes an API called CUDA that allows the creation of massively parallel programs which utilize GPUs. As a result, they are deployed in supercomputing websites around the globe.
In addition, it has recently driven into the mobile computing market, producing Tegra mobile processors for mobiles and tablets and vehicle navigation and entertainment systems. In addition to AMD, its opponents include Intel, Qualcomm, and AI-accelerator organizations such as Graphcore.
The NVIDIA® Tegra® K1 series application processor revolutionizes the globe of mobile and embedded computing as we comprehend it. Tegra K1 processors integrate a power-optimized version of the same Kepler GPU architecture that powers the best-performing graphics cards and systems available today.
Tegra K1 processors are the first to extend up features like OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenGL® 4.4, and CUDA®/GPGPU on mobile and embedded devices.
A high-performance image processing pipeline coupled with the power-optimized Kepler GPU and unique Tegra 4-PLUS-1™ CPU Complex enables visual computing and computational solutions on next-generation mobile and embedded devices. It includes autonomous robotic systems, intelligent video analytics, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), and mobile medical imaging.
Nvidia’s GPUs are used for edge-to-cloud computing and supercomputers (Nvidia furnishes the accelerators, i.e., the GPUs for many of them, including a last top fastest. It has been replaced, and the current most rapid and most power efficient is powered by AMD GPUs and CPUs). In addition, Nvidia expanded its presence in the gaming industry with its handheld game consoles Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, Shield Android TV, and its cloud gaming service GeForce Now.
Nvidia revealed plans on September 13, 2020, to acquire Arm from SoftBank, pending regulatory approval, for a worth of US$40 billion in stock and cash, which would be the biggest semiconductor acquisition. SoftBank Group will accept slightly less than a 10% stake in Nvidia, and Arm will hold its headquarters in Cambridge. On February 7, 2022, facing heightened regulatory hurdles, Nvidia signaled that it was dropping its Arm acquisition. The agreement, which would have been the biggest ever in the chip sector, was valued at $66B at its tumble.