[HN Gopher] Nvidia Announces Financial Results for Fourth Quarte...
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Nvidia Announces Financial Results for Fourth Quarter and Fiscal
2024
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-02-21 21:24 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nvidianews.nvidia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nvidianews.nvidia.com)
| mfiguiere wrote:
| CFO: "In Q4 FY 24, large cloud providers represented more than
| half of our Data Center revenue..Strong demand was driven by
| enterprise software and consumer internet applications & multiple
| industry verticals"
|
| Not clear if Meta is included in the "cloud providers", if not
| that would push the share of revenue from Big Tech even further
| to 60-70% considering the 300k H100 order from Meta.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Imagine shorting Nvidia in July 2023 last year at $500 because it
| seemed overvalued or overextended. now $700 like nothing. It goes
| to show how markets are more rational than assumed , in terms of
| correctly pricing in future earnings. It's not irrational
| exuberance, but rational. The huge rally this year was in
| anticipation of the blow-out earnings on Ai demand, which
| materialized . The 1997-2000 period in which stock prices wildly
| departed from fundamentals was more of an anomaly than the norm,
| yet people assume that it's the norm. The late 90s and tech boom
| and early 2000s crash was an outlier that made people overly
| pessimistic in subsequent decades.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Am I understanding this correctly, that you judge market
| rationality on NVidia over the period of 1 year, absolute
| bubble rally ?
|
| Even with those materialized earnings, as you say, the market
| valuation is still at >30 times those earnings (and I'm being
| very generous by extrapolating this quarter earnings, not the
| past year).
|
| There is a reason for the saying "the market can stay
| irrationnal for longer than you can stay solvent". One should
| not short bubbles. But it's still a bubble !
|
| EDIT: It's a bubble in NVidia valuation. Per se, it's a very
| good business, generating huge amounts of $.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Nvidia is a hard to value stock though. The revenue growth,
| while insanely high (120% annualized quarter over quarter), is
| decelerating. But the net income levels are insane (55% net
| income margin on revenue).
|
| This suggests huge space for competition to drive earnings
| growth down. But it's unclear when that will happen.
| nicolashahn wrote:
| Who would be the one to actually provide competition? AMD,
| Intel, someone else?
| baq wrote:
| Yes.
|
| And more you've heard about.
|
| And yet more you haven't, since they're in stealth.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I'd predict Amazon and MS. A huge portion of Nvidia's
| revenue is from data centers run by amazon/MS, and they
| both have at least some experience in designing their own
| chips (more on Amazon's end with Graviton). I'd expect that
| they are both motivated to try to design something in house
| that is more suited to their needs and cuts out the nvidia
| profit margin.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Yes, AMD (which has great GPUs, but sucks at software),
| Intel (that's improving rapidly on GPU side), and possibly
| Google with their Tensor. Also, AWS has their dedicated AI
| chips, aptly named Trainium and Inferentia.
|
| Theoretically even Apple could start producing AI chips
| based on their Neural Engine.
|
| The better NVIDIA's results are now the more that
| encourages the competitors to try and take some of the cake
| for themselves.
| hilux wrote:
| My impression is that AMD has always had technically
| competitive products, but lagged in software and ecosystem
| and marketing. (It had a long line of dud CEOs.)
|
| Lisa Su (Jensen's cousin, btw) seems to have turned the
| ship around.
| foobarian wrote:
| > Lisa Su (Jensen's cousin, btw)
|
| TIL! Wow, that's wild.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Model inference can be done with any GPU, AMD, Nvidia,
| Intel. Can even be done with CPU in many cases.
|
| Training is largely done on Nvidia cards, but there's
| nothing mandating that.
|
| Google trained Gemini on their own in-house TPUs, and
| according to their published stats it exceeds ChatGPTs
| performance.
|
| There's a collective delusion right now that somehow CUDA
| entitles Nvidia to a forever monopoly on GPU compute.
| There's no way they will maintain ~90% gross margins on
| their hardware sales. It's far too economically inefficient
| for purchasers in the long run.
|
| The ones who figure out how to use competitor cards at less
| than half the cost will have a huge advantage
|
| Right now it's fevered money pouring into what they see as
| the fastest way to get their feet into the game. Nvidia
| will do well, but that's already more than priced in right
| now.
| zamfi wrote:
| They're producing hardware...there are physical limits to
| growth rate. Is growth decelerating because there's only so
| much chipmaking capacity available, or is it because of a
| demand slowdown? The net income levels suggest maybe it's the
| former.
|
| Totally open to being wrong here!
| baq wrote:
| There's nothing rational about this valuation. Sir Isaac Newton
| would like to have a word. There was a certain radio company, a
| switch manufacturer, a video game retailer and a car company.
| Money inflows dominate the price and money outflows will
| dominate it in the future, but will it be tomorrow, in 6 months
| or 3 years is a different question.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >There's nothing rational about this valuation.
|
| The market can remain irrational far longer than you can
| remain solvent.
| multimoon wrote:
| This is like playing a game of poker where you already think the
| guy has the best possible hand he could have and somehow when he
| lays his cards down, it's even better.
| viscanti wrote:
| Was this a "5 aces" level of poker hand? Or are we not quite
| there yet?
| multimoon wrote:
| Sure seems like it was to me. It's crazy because while
| nVidia's stock has been very inflated - they couldn't have
| done a better job of backing up its price right now.
| mrtksn wrote:
| So, how many GPUs are needed to replace all the white collar
| workers? Maybe that's the potential of NVIDIA.
|
| After software have eaten the world, now AI is eating everything.
| hiddencost wrote:
| So far it's mostly licking everything
| nadermx wrote:
| Is there a limit to the number of GPU's a company may need? I
| mean for example, assume no one can compete with Nvidia. At what
| point does it become more feasible to rewrite your architecture
| or use less GPU's, since it seems Nvidia can charge, and does
| charge, what ever they want for a GPU. And can charge more if
| they so wish, which they might. And how long would that take?
| belter wrote:
| Minimum 3 to 4 years.
| hiddencost wrote:
| There are only a few companies making competitors at scale.
| It's very interesting that Google doesn't sell TPUs. They don't
| because they need every TPU they can get fabricated.
| declaredapple wrote:
| > At what point does it become more feasible to rewrite your
| architecture or use less GPU
|
| They are but it takes a lot of time.
|
| Most of the big players - Google, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and
| Microsoft all are actively developing TPU/NPUs that would be
| used instead of the H100/A100's everyone is using for machine
| learning.
|
| Google (tensorflow/jax), Meta(pytorch), Microsoft(onyx),
| Openai(triton) and Apple (mlx) each have software stacks for
| optimizing models for multiple platforms.
|
| It takes a lot of time to develop the silicon and software
| stack. As a result everyone is using H100's in the interum
| until the hardware/software catches up. Google has been using
| their TPUs already.
|
| There's other companies like Groq that are also developing
| NPU/TPU like devices.
| altruios wrote:
| Is there an Open (source) TPU project?
| nl wrote:
| There is SIMT on RISC V: https://www.semanticscholar.org/pa
| per/Simty-%3A-generalized-...
|
| And some PoC work:
| https://vortex.cc.gatech.edu/publications/hotchips-
| poster.pd...
|
| Neither are specialized TPU/NPUs but they do fast vector
| operations.
| outside415 wrote:
| each generation of models will require larger training
| clusters... at least from the majors.
| cavisne wrote:
| Using the underlying cost, it is not feasible to create a
| general purpose parallel processor for cheaper than Nvidia.
| Especially considering the economies of scale. So you basically
| need to make a bet on a less general purpose accelerator, as
| Nvidia loses its economies of scale when you do that.
|
| When you include Nvidia's huge margins, this bet is less risky,
| but it's still only one that the largest companies can make.
|
| Software alone cannot do it, you need to make a bet on
| hardware.
| tmaly wrote:
| Unless Sam gets his 7T I can't see the data center growth
| continuing on pace.
|
| I still would love to see a consumer card with 128GB of VRAM
| samspenc wrote:
| I would also love to see a consumer GPU with a lot of VRAM. I
| think 128 GB would be too expensive BUT I'm hoping the Nvidia
| 50 series comes with 32+ GB VRAM for at least the top tier
| cards of the family (today they max out at 24 GB VRAM in the
| 3090 and 4090.)
| outside415 wrote:
| imagine how impossibly sold out those cards would be.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I would love to see a rethinking of desktop hardware. GPU's are
| huge. They used to be dinky little add-on cards ... but at this
| point we almost need to have a dedicated mainboard for them.
|
| Imagine this - instead of a motherboard mounted to the back of
| the case, it is mounted in the center. Behind it would be
| another motherboard, with a socket for a GPU and ram slots for
| memory. Kinda like a right/left brain connected with a high-
| speed interconnect. You open the left side of the case to
| access CPU and its memory, you open the right side of the case
| to access the GPU and its memory.
|
| You would be able to upgrade your GPU chip independently of
| everything else. It wouldn't be mounted sideways in a PCI slot
| where additional brackets and support arms are needed. You
| could upgrade the RAM independently. Cooler, etc.
| vizzier wrote:
| What you're describing is fairly close to Intel's Beast
| Canion NUC [0] from a couple of years back. The Mobo and GFX
| essentially sit back to back. Though intel seemed to envisage
| upgrading the whole "CPU side" as a single piece (including
| ram) which probably, along with its high price, put off
| buyers.
|
| Following on from that though, there are a number of miniitx
| cases that followed on from that type of layout such as the
| fractal terra [1] which utilize a pcie riser to pass it
| rearward to the graphics card behind the motherboard. ATX/ITX
| wasn't entirely designed for it, but the layout does seem to
| be quite elegant.
|
| [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nuc-11-extreme-kit-
| beas...
|
| [1] https://www.fractal-
| design.com/products/cases/terra/terra/te...
| outside415 wrote:
| based on what I've seen from IDC and Gartner in fact it will
| keep growing for another 2-3 years in insane fashion at least.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I remember a time when NVIDIA, ATI and 3dFX were neck and neck.
|
| What ever happened?
|
| It shows that the most important move is to simply stay in the
| game, not just maximize profits
|
| Edit: added ATI which I just remembered!
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> What ever happened?_
|
| 3dfx stagnated and fell behind due to bad management decisions.
| They seemed stuck on designing 3d accelerators like it was
| still 1996, which were just drawing triangles and doing texture
| mapping, while banking on higher clocks and adding multiple
| chips on board and even multiple cards in SLI to boost
| performance, while having the CPU take care of the rest in SW.
|
| But it was 1999 already and Nvidia moved to graphics processing
| units (GPUs) which could also offload the CPU and do transform,
| lighting, triangle setup/clipping, MPEG2 motion compensation
| and a multi-pipeline rendering engine for more polygon thruput
| at same clocks, along with being fully DX7 compliant, all in a
| single chip.
|
| The market decided that Nvidia's new direction is the future
| and not what 3dfx was doing. 3df tried to change course and
| catch up but it was too late, the GPU race was too cutthroat in
| those days. Nvidia was launching a new GPU generation every 6
| months(!) instead of every 3 years like today, so a 6-12 month
| setback was a guaranteed death sentence no matter what you did.
|
| Also, one of 3dfx biggest blunders was trying to become a board
| maker themselves by spending a lot of cash buying a board
| manufacturer, which emptied their bank accounts and angered
| their other board partners who now saw them as unfair
| competitors so they moved to making ATI/Nvidia boards instead.
|
| _> It shows that the most important move is to simply stay in
| the game, not just maximize profits_
|
| How do you stay in the game if you go bankrupt because your
| products aren't competitive?
| nequo wrote:
| Just to add to what you're saying, the Acquired podcast has a
| couple long-form episodes on Nvidia and its competition:
|
| https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-
| company-1993...
|
| https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-machine-
| learning...
|
| CUDA itself is also a non-negligible factor in their success.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| CUDA wasn't even a thing when 3dfx went bust. Work on what
| was to become CUDA started at Berkely by a phd student
| sometime in 2000. CUDA first released to the general public
| all the way in mid-2007.
| nequo wrote:
| You're right. 3dfx is an earlier story.
| speps wrote:
| Nvidia invested in CUDA for decades! Following research papers
| in computer graphics or physics for example, you'd find a
| transition from Fortran to CUDA over many years. That helped
| quite a lot when ML came back and CUDA made it easy. They
| ported many basics like FFT, BLAS, etc. to CUDA so the building
| blocks were there already when AI grew too. Of course, it
| helped that many Python ML library backends also supported GPU
| via CUDA.
|
| If you look at the same landscape from AMD's side, it's
| lackluster to say the least. And they're only now trying to
| catch up... And they have to make it CUDA compatible!
|
| Nvidia won on the tools side, the GPUs aren't necessarily
| faster, but the only way to use them easily is CUDA.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I'd say Nvidia's release of Cg differentiated them, winning
| wide developer favor, with a positive constructive feedback.
|
| Cg made programmability of shaders widely accessible, since C
| was (20 years ago) widely known?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cg_(programming_language)
| foobarian wrote:
| Well ATI is still around as AMD. But definitely behind the
| lead.
| m463 wrote:
| I remember when SLI was two graphics cards, each handling
| alternate scan lines of a vga monitor.
| inadilemma wrote:
| Random, but a serious question. I've just received an offer from
| Nvidia as a Senior SWE, and another from [insert FAANG].
|
| Should I be scared of the bubble-ness of Nvidia? I have a lot of
| faith in the company and its vision, but reading about the bubble
| always scares me.
| karmasimida wrote:
| It is already a highly speculated bubble, the share price is
| swinging drastically within the same day.
|
| That being said, Nvidia will have a good 2-3 years in the
| future, until the cloud providers start mass replace their
| chips with in-house ones.
|
| For money, unfortunately, it is as good as anyone's guess, but
| if you join now, double your share, it will be close to 4T. I
| personally didn't think that is sustainable amount of money if
| market/competition does their duty.
| HPMOR wrote:
| You should ABSOLUTELY take the Nvidia offer over other FAANG.
| The share price of Nvidia is not speculative hype. It's very
| reasonable given their growth. This is not some random crypto
| coin. Nvidia's share price really does reflect economic reality
| and their position in the market. As an employee there, you'll
| have the opportunity to purchase shares at a reduced price
| through their Employee Purchasing Program. Also, any RSUs or
| options you get will appreciate tremendously. Financially, the
| best decision here is to work at Nvidia.
| sfmz wrote:
| Think of Sam Altman's ask: $7T. 7 trillion dollars is going to
| flow into a company that looks a lot like Nvidia whether its
| directed by Sam or not.
|
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sam-altman-wants-7-trillion
| cavisne wrote:
| My impression is they still have a fairly efficient culture,
| the main problem with joining a bubble company would be if they
| are overhiring/losing focus.
|
| Just sell shares when they vest to reduce your risk.
| saintradon wrote:
| Take it and RUN with it.
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