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Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

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Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#261

Post by srj »

I interned at NVIDIA in 2009 on the kernel mode driver team. Was super fun there in terms of the project work and the people. If the code still exists, I created the main class that schedules work out to the GPU on Windows.

That level of programming gave such rewarding moments in between difficult debugging sessions. When I wanted to test a new kernel driver build I needed to walk into some massive room with all of these interconnected machines that emulated the non-yet-fabricated GPU hardware. One of the full time people on my team was going insane trying to track down a memory corruption issue between GPU memory and main memory when things paged out the entire time I was there.

Back then the stock was around $7/share and the CEO announced a 10% paycut across the board (even including my intern salary) and had an all hands with everyone in the cafeteria. It's pretty cool they went from that vulnerable state, with Intel threatening to build in GPU capabilities, to the powerhouse they are today.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#262

Post by geodel »

johnvanommen wrote: post #75
epolanski wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they so far ahead? AMD GPUs get comparable results as of late on Stable Diffusion. Software and hardware from competitors will catch up, crunching 4/8/16 bit width numbers is no rocket science.

> Software and hardware from competitors will catch up, crunching 4/8/16 bit width numbers is no rocket science. I made the mistake of buying an A770 from Intel, based on the spec sheet. Hardware is comparable to what Nvidia is selling, for 70% of the price. It's basically a useless paperweight. The AI software crashes constantly, and when it's not crashing, it performs at half the level of Nvidia's cards. Turns out…

Its similar story with iPhone/ iOS vs Android. Endless talk about how Android is about to get so much better in performance compared to iPhone didn't yield much. I guess lately people have accepted perf will never match up. At least Android massive market share in rest of the world so with perf/pricing/compatibily/ localization it will remain competitive in some sense.

I hope but do really foresee that AI/ML systems will have similar competitive stack like Nvidia.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#263

Post by slashdev »

uluyol wrote: post #233
PheonixPharts wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what having a monopoly looks like ! As someone who has been in the AI/ML space for over a decade, and even had an AMD/Radeon card for more than half of that, I can't help but feel that this is partially AMD's own fault. For many, many years it seemed to me that AMD just didn't take AI/ML seriously whereas, for all it's faults, NVIDIA seemed to catch on very early that ML presented a tremendous potential mar…

Catching up in this space requires a significant, sustained investment over multiple years and competent software engineers. It's not a simple thing for a hardware company to suddenly become competitive with Nvidia in AI/ML. Instead, they've been going after the CPU market (and winning), HPC/scientific computing (high FP64 performance, in contrast to Nvidia's focus on low-precision ML compute), and integrating Xilinx…

I think their hardware is comparable with nvidia. The problem is the software is awful by comparison. It’s hard to run any of the AI workloads with AMD, and even when you can the performance is poor. The software investment just hasn’t been made. Until then they are not even in the game.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#264

Post by gmm1990 »

gen220 wrote: post #255

How durable do we think their Revenue is? To remind us all, they're selling capitalized assets, not contracts or services. Is the marginal demand for GPU chips over the next 3 years enough to sustain (or grow?) current revenues and keep this valuation afloat? To me, it feels like a comparatively fragile situation to find themselves in, to convince the world of 2025 that they need even more chips , unless "everybody n…

It seems pretty similar to Tesla’s valuation with a product that won’t be as sticky as electric cars

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#265

Post by radium3d »

srj wrote: post #261

I interned at NVIDIA in 2009 on the kernel mode driver team. Was super fun there in terms of the project work and the people. If the code still exists, I created the main class that schedules work out to the GPU on Windows. That level of programming gave such rewarding moments in between difficult debugging sessions. When I wanted to test a new kernel driver build I needed to walk into some massive room with all of t…

I do wonder though, why has moore's law stopped in its tracks? Using CS:GO benchmark, a 1070 got 218 FPS, while a 4090 is at 477 FPS. Only a ~2.2x increase in FPS in 6 years? :(

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#266

Post by elbasti »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #241
mikestew wrote: post #4

Whelp, I guess those September NVDA call options I sold are going to get exercised. Who woulda guessed after the crypto fallout that "AI" would come along and bump the price back up. Record revenues, and a dividend of $0.04 on a $450 stock? That's not even worth the paperwork. For example, if you bought 100 shares, that's $45K. From that, around September $4 will show up in your account, which you have to pay taxes o…

There's a $25billion buyback this coming quarter. That's how they distribute profits these days.

A stock buyback trades certainty of wealth transfer (you're not sure the price will go up, or by how much!) for flexibility in when the investor takes the gains for purposes of fiscal planning.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#267

Post by slashdev »

TheAlchemist wrote: post #99
scrlk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine."

Exactly this ! And as somebody with a significant short position, I would add - "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" ! Their numbers for this and next Q are absolutely amazing. It's also quite "refreshing" - a company with great product, almost without competition (so far - it will come real quick). And fun part being their main advantage is probably CUDA and not even the chips itself (wh…

Yeah, there is no world where Nvidia grows into this valuation. It would have to be bigger than the entire semiconductor business today by itself. If you think AI can bring that much growth, well then it could happen, but it seems extremely unlikely to me.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#268

Post by mthoms »

rvz wrote: post #71
gorenb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stocks are lottery tickets…

Exactly. Nvidia is just one of many lottery tickets and 8% in one day is hardly volatile in stocks.

The point is that 8% is volatile relative to the market cap. That's a massive amount of (paper) wealth being created.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#269

Post by HDThoreaun »

sgarman wrote: post #149
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For much of tech hardware world, declining costs and increasing performance have been the general trends for as long as most of us have been alive.

Off the top of my head the only thing I can think of that did that was TVs.

CPU's are cheaper adjusted for inflation before even considering performance. Ram and SSDs are much much cheaper than they were 5 years ago.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#270

Post by HDThoreaun »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #26
solardev wrote: post #10

I miss the small graphics company that used to care about gamers :(

Well, they still make gamer cards. As a company with more than one employee they are able to multitask, and the knock on benefits of all the investment will improving their gaming products as well. I think there are a fair amount of dual use cards being sold - I know I’ve got a 4090 that I use for local AI stuff, and it renders RTX Witcher 3 like a beast.

Basically no one can afford a 4080 let alone a 4090. Even 4070 is out of reach for many.
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