NVIDIA CEO Calls AMD Partnership With Intel For Radeon GPUs A Losing Strategy
It's definitely been in interesting week in the world of tech, and during that time, NVIDA issued another blockbuster earnings report. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang recently talked about his company's quarterly earnings and hit many other topics during an new interview. During the chat, Huang was naturally asked about the biggest news to happen in the GPU market in recent memory: Intel's adoption of AMD graphics for its Kaby Lake-G family of processors.
When asked if this new AMD-Intel partnership would cause NVIDIA to alter its future GPU plans, Huang fired back, "Not really. I think it is a loss for AMD. Their leadership for future generations is now in question. It’s a most amazing and public recognition of the importance of the GPU."
The GPU market is about to be turned upside down, especially with the defection of Raja Koduri from AMD to Intel. Koduri was the head of AMD's Radeon Technology Group and was instrumental in projects like the Vega GPU. He will now be tasked, in part, with jumpstarting Intel's efforts to create a dedicated GPU.
While the cryptocurrency miners are slurping up all the video card stock that is out there and making it hard for gamers to find video cards, that doesn't mean cryptocurrency is driving a lot of the current success that NVIDIA is seeing. Huang says that crypto is "small but not zero" and that is because the NVIDIA GPU business is so large according to Huang. That "small" assertion doesn't mean it's not a huge amount of money though; Huang says crypto is worth about $70 million to NVIDIA. He goes on to say that it is "large" for some, but "small" for NVIDIA.
Huang also talked a bit about his prediction that self-driving cars would be on the market around the start of the next decade. Huang said, "In three or four years, you will see there are places for passenger cars where you can have autonomous driving. The way to think about that, for some period of time, we will not be autonomous all the time. But we can create great products that are geo-fenced and self-driving. The AI technology will keep you out of harm’s way. That is why we believe in an AI car that drives for you."
Going back to those NVIDIA financials, the company reported $2.6 billion in revenue for the quarter that ended on October 31. Of that $2.6 billion, $1.5 billion of it came from graphics chips for gaming PCs. Data center went beyond $500 million in revenue for the first time ever for the company.
