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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

#311

Post by radium3d »

dahart wrote: post #286
radium3d wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :(

Between those 2 GPUs, the fp32 perf went up 12.7x according to TechPowerUp’s specs. The SM count went up 8.5x (which represents Moore’s law and note is almost exactly in line with Moore’s prediction), and the clock rate went up 1.5x. The FPS of CSGO (or any game) is not a good measure of Moore’s law. Games have all kinds of complexities and caveats that will prevent them from scaling linearly. I used to write some of…

Wow, didn't expect to get so many comments. It's just interesting to me that we have 500hz monitors, yet games are still coming out that only run at ~70 fps on a 3080, etc. I used CS:GO as a comparison just because it was an example capable of coming near 500 FPS. Avg FPS are not going up fast enough in my opinion. I understand some games purposefully limit FPS for physics calculations, but there are many that do not.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#312

Post by paulmd »

jjpprrrr wrote: post #232
highwaylights wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can really see Intel figuring this out. A lot of people on HN talking about Intel as an also-ran just like they spoke about AMD before Zen. Raptor Lake is at 7nm and incredibly competitive there (~2700 single core on geekbench, taken with a pinch of salt). They’re still planning on being on 1.8nm/18A within 2 years, while at the same time ramping up their GPU efforts (albeit using TSMC for 4nm). Nvidia is very much…

Raptor Lake uses the "Intel 7" node which is actually 10nm, not 7 nm. It does have roughly the same density as TSMC's 7nm node.

In reality it literally is as simple as “intel says it’s 7nm so it’s 7nm”, but density is what determines the node number, insofar as anything determines it beyond marketing.

So, if intel 7 is a 10nm class node then so is tsmc N7. But the whole industry cooked their node names a decade ago and intel is allowed to do the same terminology. To do anything otherwise would be a needless marketing disadvantage. If someone’s cheating on marketing, everyone has to - and the reality was everyone but intel was already cheating.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#313

Post by radium3d »

ATMLOTTOBEER wrote: post #275
radium3d wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :(

Fps in CSGO isn’t really so dependent on the GPU as more modern games, so comparing with a different game might be more accurate.

I'm curious, do you know of a study that has proven that single core CPU or other is the bottleneck in CS:GO?

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#314

Post by smolder »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #5

Up more than 10% after hours compared to close yesterday. I really thought NVDA had hit its ceiling at $1+ trillion, apparently not. Really does feel like a huge opportunity for Intel to me. They have the fab capacity to pump out at least reasonably competitive GPUs if they can figure out the software side of things. P/E still above 50 even after the AI craze 9x'd eps this quarter. Still hard for me to see that valua…

I wonder if this is what Nancy Pelosi's husband actually bought all his NVDA in preparation for, way back then. Their prices have been shit for consumers since then, but it's still been good for them.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#315

Post by Dalewyn »

girvo wrote: post #299
_gabe_ wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But GameWorks' capabilities are necessarily Nvidia-optimized; such code may perform poorly on AMD GPUs. From the arstechnica article about Witcher 3. How dare Nvidia optimize their game enhancing effects for Nvidia hardware and forget to do it for their competitors hardware as well! And as for a lot of these complaints, could it be that a lot of companies only optimize for hardware that has the largest market share…

> could it be that a lot of companies only optimize for hardware that has the largest market share? Yes, but also Nvidia partners directly with companies too (money can/does change hands). Now the flip side is: so does AMD.

>Now the flip side is: so does AMD.

And their antics shutting out Nvidia (eg: FSR only, no DLSS) aren't being received well, not the least because their offerings are objectively inferior to Nvidia's.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#317

Post by disambiguation »

solardev wrote: post #10

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

On the flip side, I often wonder if the current AI revolution would have stalled if not for the mature and abundant supply of high powered graphics cards that just happen to also be great for ML.

The gamers paved the way!

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#318

Post by paulmd »

solardev wrote: post #259
ancientworldnow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamers like to ignore inflation and increasing fab costs and pretend cards should cost the same forever with double performance gains every 1.5 years.

Why do GPUs get so much more expensive compared to the rest of the system? CPUs, hard drives, prebuilt systems, laptops etc. haven't gotten ridiculously more expensive. It used to be that $200 would get you a low-range GPU, $400 a midrange, and $600 a pretty darned good one. The 1070 launched at $379 (or $480 in 2023 dollars), the 2070 at $499, the 3070 at $499, then all of a sudden the 4070 now is $599. That's a big…

It’s because CPUs tend to be fundamentally limited in the ways they can efficiently utilize transistors to scale performance, by things like cache latency, reorder depth, branch prediction, etc. While gpus have always been god’s strongest soldier for putting transistors on silicon scalably. They were the perfect machine for a world where transistors per dollar doubled every 18 months.

On the other hand now that it’s stopped, so has raw performance scaling. There was a few generations of cleanup, but you can’t squeeze blood from a stone forever. Maxwell arguably cut too far and pascal had to start adding functionality back. Gpus are like e-cores, large powerful cores mean you get fewer of them and that often works out to a lower PPA. There aren’t many opportunities for cool tricks and the model doesn’t favor using lots of area. The coding is written for extreme parallelism already, so, that’s not a problem, it’s inherent to the platform.

Transistor per $ growth hasn’t completely stopped but it’s certainly nowhere near what it was 10 years ago, even if you factor in things like packaging/stacking the total wafer area still runs up a big bill that offset most of the density gains. And that’s what we’ve been seeing over the last 10 years in gpus too. 4070 is about the same area and cutdown as GTX 1070 but wafers cost like 8x as much.

What you have to do in this operating regime is find ways to get more performance per transistor - and that’s exactly what Jensen made a big bet on 5 years ago with dlss. 7% more transistors that with DLSS 2.5 give 30% speedup at native quality and 50-70% speedup at iso-quality with FSR2 Quality mode.

That’s what the future looks like - rewriting your applications to take advantage of new accelerators that provide large speedups. And the rewriting is very minimal for any application that uses TAAU already. It sucks but if cost/transistor is not going to come down you have to get more out of the transistors you have. Work smarter not harder.

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#319

Post by mortehu »

mikeweiss wrote: post #8
NickC25 wrote: post #3

Absolutely monster numbers. The aftermarket trading is up over 8% as of right now, roughly $41 USD to approximately $513 a share. Insane. Anyone who is a lot more versed in company valuation methodology see this as being near peak value, or does Nvidia have a lot more room to run?

In my opinion it's likely mostly pull forward demand. Companies are racing to buy as many chips as possible and hoard them. I already saw a few posts here on HN from companies that threw down insane amounts of $$ on H100s and are now looking to rent out their excess capacity. I'm guessing we'll be seeing a lot more posts like that soon.

Looking to rent out, or fully booked for the next year and looking to buy more GPUs?

Re: Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024

#320

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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