The Patriot Hellfire M.2 PCIe SSD is Patriot’s first NVMe SSD, and one of several similar products based on Phison’s E7 NVMe controller paired with Toshiba 15nm MLC. The Patriot Hellfire is an entry-level PCIe SSD that is largely free of the pitfalls of Intel’s cheaper but TLC-based SSD 600p.
NVIDIA’s fiscal year for 2017 ended on January 29, 2017, and for the fourth quarter and full year, NVIDIA reports they had record revenues. For Q4 2017, NVIDIA is reporting revenue of $2.173 billio.n, up 55% from a year ago. Gross margin came in at 60.0%, which is up 3.5% from Q4 2016. Operating income for the quarter was $733 million, up 191%, and net income was up 216% to $655 million. The very high growth in operating income and net income are even more impressive, since Q4 2016 was also a record for them at the time. NVIDIA reported $0.99 per share earnings for this quarter, up 183%.
| NVIDIA Q4 2017 Financial Results (GAAP) | |||||
| Q4’2017 | Q3’2017 | Q4’2016 | Q/Q | Y/Y | |
| Revenue (in millions USD) | $2173 | $2004 | $1401 | +8% | +55% |
| Gross Margin | 60.0% | 59.0% | 56.5% | +1.0% | +3.5% |
| Operating Income (in millions USD) | $733 | $639 | $252 | +15% | +191% |
| Net Income | $655 | $542 | $207 | +21% | +183% |
| EPS | $0.99 | $0.83 | $0.35 | +19% | +183% |
Even though 2016 was a record year for NVIDIA, 2017 was even better. NVIDIA reported record revenue of $6.91 billion for the full fiscal year 2017, which is up 38% from a year ago, and had a net income of $1.666 billion. Earnings per share for the year were $2.57. They also repurchased $739 million in shares over the last year, and paid $261 million in dividends.
The majority of NVIDIA’s revenue came from their Gaming segment, which includes their GeForce GPUs. The launch of Pascal has clearly been very successful, and for the quarter NVIDIA’s Gaming segment had revenues of $1.348 billion, up from $810 million a year ago. This is a gain of 66.4% year-over-year, on a market they were already at the top of. This quarter, they also launched the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti mobile GPUs, and a new SHIELD TV, along with unveiling the GeForce NOW game streaming service.
Professional Visualization had much more modest growth, being up “only” 10.8% from last year, with revenues of $225 million for the quarter. They just launched the GP100 Quadro though, so it may have even more growth to come.
Datacenter has been a big focus from NVIDIA in diversifying their portfolio, and this quarter they had some announcements here as well, with a collaboration with Microsoft on the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, powered by Microsoft Azure cloud running on NVIDIA DGX-1 deep learning system. They unveiled the DGX SATURNV AI supercomputer, and partnered with the National Cancer Institute and US Department of Energy to build CANDLE to “advance cancer research”. The growth of NVIDIA’s Datacenter segment has been almost exponential, and it is now the second largest source of revenue for the company. For Q4 2017, NVIDIA reported $296 million in revenue from this segment, up from $97 million a year ago, or an increase of 205.1%.
NVIDIA has also diversified into Automotive with their Tegra lineup, after originally releasing it as a mobile SoC. This has also been a boon for the company, and they are now powering self-driving cars, and the infotainment systems of major manufacturers like Audi, and Mercedes-Benz, and they’ve partnered with Bosch on self-driving systems as well. This segment saw revenues of $128 million for the quarter, up from $93 million a year ago, or 37.6%.
Finally, the OEM and IP segment had revenues of $176 million, down from $198 million a year ago. Unfortunately NVIDIA has not gone into much detail about just why this is dropping, and how revenue from this category breaks down.
| NVIDIA Quarterly Revenue Comparison (GAAP) | |||||
| In millions | Q4’2017 | Q3’2017 | Q4’2016 | Q/Q | Y/Y |
| Gaming | $1348 | $1244 | $810 | +8.4% | +66.4% |
| Professional Visualization | $225 | $207 | $203 | +8.7% | +10.8% |
| Datacenter | $296 | $240 | $97 | +23.3% | +205.1% |
| Automotive | $128 | $127 | $93 | +0.8% | +37.6% |
| OEM & IP | $176 | $186 | $198 | -5.4 | -11.1% |
For next quarter, NVIDIA is expecting revenues of $1.9 billion, plus or minus 2%, and gross margins between 59.5 and 59.7%.
The diversification of NVIDIA from a purely GPU company has clearly paid dividends, especially when their core market is doing as well as it is. The datacenter growth is clearly very high margin as well, considering the jump in net income for the quarter.
Source: NVIDIA Investor Relations
NVIDIA’s fiscal year for 2017 ended on January 29, 2017, and for the fourth quarter and full year, NVIDIA reports they had record revenues. For Q4 2017, NVIDIA is reporting revenue of $2.173 billio.n, up 55% from a year ago. Gross margin came in at 60.0%, which is up 3.5% from Q4 2016. Operating income for the quarter was $733 million, up 191%, and net income was up 216% to $655 million. The very high growth in operating income and net income are even more impressive, since Q4 2016 was also a record for them at the time. NVIDIA reported $0.99 per share earnings for this quarter, up 183%.
| NVIDIA Q4 2017 Financial Results (GAAP) | |||||
| Q4’2017 | Q3’2017 | Q4’2016 | Q/Q | Y/Y | |
| Revenue (in millions USD) | $2173 | $2004 | $1401 | +8% | +55% |
| Gross Margin | 60.0% | 59.0% | 56.5% | +1.0% | +3.5% |
| Operating Income (in millions USD) | $733 | $639 | $252 | +15% | +191% |
| Net Income | $655 | $542 | $207 | +21% | +183% |
| EPS | $0.99 | $0.83 | $0.35 | +19% | +183% |
Even though 2016 was a record year for NVIDIA, 2017 was even better. NVIDIA reported record revenue of $6.91 billion for the full fiscal year 2017, which is up 38% from a year ago, and had a net income of $1.666 billion. Earnings per share for the year were $2.57. They also repurchased $739 million in shares over the last year, and paid $261 million in dividends.
The majority of NVIDIA’s revenue came from their Gaming segment, which includes their GeForce GPUs. The launch of Pascal has clearly been very successful, and for the quarter NVIDIA’s Gaming segment had revenues of $1.348 billion, up from $810 million a year ago. This is a gain of 66.4% year-over-year, on a market they were already at the top of. This quarter, they also launched the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti mobile GPUs, and a new SHIELD TV, along with unveiling the GeForce NOW game streaming service.
Professional Visualization had much more modest growth, being up “only” 10.8% from last year, with revenues of $225 million for the quarter. They just launched the GP100 Quadro though, so it may have even more growth to come.
Datacenter has been a big focus from NVIDIA in diversifying their portfolio, and this quarter they had some announcements here as well, with a collaboration with Microsoft on the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, powered by Microsoft Azure cloud running on NVIDIA DGX-1 deep learning system. They unveiled the DGX SATURNV AI supercomputer, and partnered with the National Cancer Institute and US Department of Energy to build CANDLE to “advance cancer research”. The growth of NVIDIA’s Datacenter segment has been almost exponential, and it is now the second largest source of revenue for the company. For Q4 2017, NVIDIA reported $296 million in revenue from this segment, up from $97 million a year ago, or an increase of 205.1%.
NVIDIA has also diversified into Automotive with their Tegra lineup, after originally releasing it as a mobile SoC. This has also been a boon for the company, and they are now powering self-driving cars, and the infotainment systems of major manufacturers like Audi, and Mercedes-Benz, and they’ve partnered with Bosch on self-driving systems as well. This segment saw revenues of $128 million for the quarter, up from $93 million a year ago, or 37.6%.
Finally, the OEM and IP segment had revenues of $176 million, down from $198 million a year ago. Unfortunately NVIDIA has not gone into much detail about just why this is dropping, and how revenue from this category breaks down.
| NVIDIA Quarterly Revenue Comparison (GAAP) | |||||
| In millions | Q4’2017 | Q3’2017 | Q4’2016 | Q/Q | Y/Y |
| Gaming | $1348 | $1244 | $810 | +8.4% | +66.4% |
| Professional Visualization | $225 | $207 | $203 | +8.7% | +10.8% |
| Datacenter | $296 | $240 | $97 | +23.3% | +205.1% |
| Automotive | $128 | $127 | $93 | +0.8% | +37.6% |
| OEM & IP | $176 | $186 | $198 | -5.4 | -11.1% |
For next quarter, NVIDIA is expecting revenues of $1.9 billion, plus or minus 2%, and gross margins between 59.5 and 59.7%.
The diversification of NVIDIA from a purely GPU company has clearly paid dividends, especially when their core market is doing as well as it is. The datacenter growth is clearly very high margin as well, considering the jump in net income for the quarter.
Source: NVIDIA Investor Relations
A quick news piece on information coming out of Intel’s annual Investor Day in California. As confirmed to Ashraf Eassa by Intel at the event, Intel’s 8th Generation Core microarchitecture will remain on the 14nm node. This is an interesting development with the recent launch of Intel’s 7th Generation Core products being touted as the ‘optimization’ behind the new ‘Process-Architecture-Optimization’ three-stage cadence that had replaced the old ‘tick-tock’ cadence. With Intel stringing out 14nm (or at least, an improved variant of 14nm as we’ve seen on 7th Gen) for another generation, it makes us wonder where exactly Intel can promise future performance or efficiency gains on the design unless they start implementing microarchitecture changes.
Despite this, if you were to believe supposed ‘leaked’ roadmaps (which we haven’t confirmed from a second source as of yet), the 8th Generation product ‘Cannon Lake’ is more geared towards the Y and U part of Intel’s roadmap. This would ring true with a mobile first strategy that Intel has mirrored with recent generations such that the smaller, low power chips are off the production line for a new product first, however we’d also expect 10nm to also be in the smaller chips first too (as demonstrated at CES). Where Cannon Lake will end up in the desktop or enterprise segment however remains to be seen. To put something a bit more solid into this, Ashraf also mentioned words from Dr. Venkata ‘Murthy’ Renduchintala, VP and GM of Client and IoT:
‘Murthy referred to it at the event, process tech use will be ‘fluid’ based on segment’.
If one read too much into this, we may start seeing a blend of process nodes for different segments at the same time for different areas of the market. We already do have that to some extent with the mainstream CPUs and the HEDT/Xeon families, but this phrasing seems that we might get another split between consumer products or consumer and enterprise. We may get to a point where Intel’s ‘Gen’ naming scheme for its CPUs covers two or more process node variants.
Speaking of the Enterprise segment, another bit of information has also surfaced, coming from a slide during a talk by Diane Bryant (EVP/GM of Data Center) and posted online by Ashraf. The slide contains the words ‘Data center first for next process node’
We can either talk about process node in terms of the ‘number’, either 14nm/10nm/7nm, or by variants within that process (high power, high efficiency). One might suspect that this means Intel is moving hard and fast with 10nm for Xeons and big computing projects, despite showing off 10nm silicon at CES earlier this year. That being said, it’s important to remember that the data center market is large, and includes high-density systems with many cores, such as Atom cores, and Intel did recently open up its 10nm foundry business to ARM Artisan IP projects. So while the slide does say ‘Data center first’, it might be referring to DC projects based on ARM IP in that segment rather than big 4-24+ core Xeons. At this stage of the game it is hard to tell.
On top of all this, Intel still has extreme confidence in its foundry business. An image posted by Dick James of Siliconics from the livestream shows Intel expects to have a three-year process node advantage when its competitors (Samsung, TSMC) start launching 10nm:
I’ve been brief with this news for a reason – at this point there are a lot of balls in the air with many different ways to take this information, and the Investor Day is winding down on talks and finishing with smaller 1-on-1 meetings. We may get further clarification on this news as the day goes on.
Update 1: On speaking with Diane Bryant, the ‘data center gets new nodes first’ is going to be achieved by using multiple small dies on a single package. But rather than use a multi-chip package as in previous multi-core products, Intel will be using EMIB as demonstrated at ISSCC: an MCP/2.5D interposer-like design with an Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB).
An Intel Slide from ISSCC, via PC Watch
Initially EMIB was thought of as a technology relating to Intel’s acquisition of Altera and potential future embedded FPGA designs, and given the slide above and comments made at the Investor Day, it seems there are other plans for this technology too. The benefit of using multiple smaller dies over a large monolithic 600mm2 die is typically related to cost and yield, however the EMIB technology also has to be up to par and there may be a latency or compatibility trade-off.
A quick news piece on information coming out of Intel’s annual Investor Day in California. As confirmed to Ashraf Eassa by Intel at the event, Intel’s 8th Generation Core microarchitecture will remain on the 14nm node. This is an interesting development with the recent launch of Intel’s 7th Generation Core products being touted as the ‘optimization’ behind the new ‘Process-Architecture-Optimization’ three-stage cadence that had replaced the old ‘tick-tock’ cadence. With Intel stringing out 14nm (or at least, an improved variant of 14nm as we’ve seen on 7th Gen) for another generation, it makes us wonder where exactly Intel can promise future performance or efficiency gains on the design unless they start implementing microarchitecture changes.
Despite this, if you were to believe supposed ‘leaked’ roadmaps (which we haven’t confirmed from a second source as of yet), the 8th Generation product ‘Cannon Lake’ is more geared towards the Y and U part of Intel’s roadmap. This would ring true with a mobile first strategy that Intel has mirrored with recent generations such that the smaller, low power chips are off the production line for a new product first, however we’d also expect 10nm to also be in the smaller chips first too (as demonstrated at CES). Where Cannon Lake will end up in the desktop or enterprise segment however remains to be seen. To put something a bit more solid into this, Ashraf also mentioned words from Dr. Venkata ‘Murthy’ Renduchintala, VP and GM of Client and IoT:
‘Murthy referred to it at the event, process tech use will be ‘fluid’ based on segment’.
If one read too much into this, we may start seeing a blend of process nodes for different segments at the same time for different areas of the market. We already do have that to some extent with the mainstream CPUs and the HEDT/Xeon families, but this phrasing seems that we might get another split between consumer products or consumer and enterprise. We may get to a point where Intel’s ‘Gen’ naming scheme for its CPUs covers two or more process node variants.
Speaking of the Enterprise segment, another bit of information has also surfaced, coming from a slide during a talk by Diane Bryant (EVP/GM of Data Center) and posted online by Ashraf. The slide contains the words ‘Data center first for next process node’
We can either talk about process node in terms of the ‘number’, either 14nm/10nm/7nm, or by variants within that process (high power, high efficiency). One might suspect that this means Intel is moving hard and fast with 10nm for Xeons and big computing projects, despite showing off 10nm silicon at CES earlier this year. That being said, it’s important to remember that the data center market is large, and includes high-density systems with many cores, such as Atom cores, and Intel did recently open up its 10nm foundry business to ARM Artisan IP projects. So while the slide does say ‘Data center first’, it might be referring to DC projects based on ARM IP in that segment rather than big 4-24+ core Xeons. At this stage of the game it is hard to tell.
On top of all this, Intel still has extreme confidence in its foundry business. An image posted by Dick James of Siliconics from the livestream shows Intel expects to have a three-year process node advantage when its competitors (Samsung, TSMC) start launching 10nm:
I’ve been brief with this news for a reason – at this point there are a lot of balls in the air with many different ways to take this information, and the Investor Day is winding down on talks and finishing with smaller 1-on-1 meetings. We may get further clarification on this news as the day goes on.
Update 1: On speaking with Diane Bryant, the ‘data center gets new nodes first’ is going to be achieved by using multiple small dies on a single package. But rather than use a multi-chip package as in previous multi-core products, Intel will be using EMIB as demonstrated at ISSCC: an MCP/2.5D interposer-like design with an Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB).
An Intel Slide from ISSCC, via PC Watch
Initially EMIB was thought of as a technology relating to Intel’s acquisition of Altera and potential future embedded FPGA designs, and given the slide above and comments made at the Investor Day, it seems there are other plans for this technology too. The benefit of using multiple smaller dies over a large monolithic 600mm2 die is typically related to cost and yield, however the EMIB technology also has to be up to par and there may be a latency or compatibility trade-off.