Video Cards & GPUs - Page 307

NVIDIA has just posted their Q4 2017 earnings report, where company shares rose 10% in after-hours trading.

NVIDIA reported EPS of $1.78 on revenue of $2.91 billion, beating out analysts' expectations of $1.17 per share on $2.69 billion of revenue. NVIDIA stock has risen by an incredible 83% in the last 12 months, with just their gaming and data center businesses increasing revenue by a huge 24% year-over-year.

The company wasn't clear on how much money it made from the massive boom of cryptocurrency mining, but NVIDIA's CFO said that the demand for its GPUs for crypto mining had "accounted for a higher percentage of revenue than the previous quarter" and that it had "exceeded expectations".

We all know NVIDIA is a mammoth company and now their Q4 2017 earnings call has seen NVIDIA throw out some fighting words against AMD.

During their Q4 2017 earnings call, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that they are "10x bigger than our GPU competitor" and that they have "a lot more suppliers... supplying us". Ryan Shrout from PC Perspective picked the tweet up, where Shrout added he isn't agreeing with AMD's statement that "memory is holding back GPU ramps".

Now some of you are probably thinking "10x bigger, whatever" but I checked both companies market caps at the time of writing. AMD has a market cap of $10.8 billion while NVIDIA stomps around with a massive market cap of $131 billion, so yes, NVIDIA are truly 10x bigger.

It has been a few weeks of manically high graphics card prices, but things are finally starting to settle - at least a little, with pricing now falling on the higher-end cards to not-so-insane-but-just-as-insane prices. I broke a story about GPU prices a couple of weeks ago, but now things have gotten slightly - but not totally better.

The most expensive listing on Amazon for a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition is $3370, but you can buy an EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC Black Edition GAMING for $859, or an ASUS ROG STRIX GeForce GTX 1080 Ti for $1099. EVGA's other GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 GAMING costs $1159, while the AORUS GTX 1080 Ti costs $1197. Crazy stuff, but a few hundred dollars cheaper than the post-crypto crash over the last couple of weeks.

Over on the Team Red side of things, the most expensive listing of a Vega-based graphics card goes to the GIGABYTE Radeon RX Vega 64 that costs a whopping $1999, or the retail version of the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition which rolls out with a $1799 price tag. Other than that, we have a PowerColor RX Vega 64 for $1099, while SAPPHIRE's RX Vega 64 is $1329, and the XFX RX Vega 64 is $1449.

AMD released their updated GPU roadmap not too long ago, and for the last month or so I've been thinking long and hard about it, as well as talking to sources of mine within the industry to find out WTF is going on over at AMD in regards to their Radeon products.

Back in October I exclusively reported that AMD would be launching Navi during SIGGRAPH 2018, in July/August this year. At the time everyone else called me crazy and that it wasn't going to launch that early, but now I've got other sources that are backing up my claims and saying that I was right. The first Navi reveal will be a professional card and not a consumer-focused Radeon RX Navi at all, that card will launch in 2019.

Then a story on WCCFTech popped up which said that "Navi will be the last GCN-based architecture" and that it will be "succeeded by brand new micro-architecture in 2020/2021 timeframe, execution of GCN successor being led by new RTG leadership". This is interesting, so I reached out to some sources to clarify a few things.

AMD has finally announced that they've appointed Mike Rayfield as their new Senior Vice President and General Manager of Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), alongside David Wang who will act as Senior Vice President of Engineering. Both of the new RTG members will report directly to Lisa Su.

Rayfield will handle the strategy and business management side of AMD's graphics business, something that includes consumer graphics, professional graphics, and semi-custom products. Wang will handle graphics engineering, with his tasks including technical strategy, architecture, hardware and software for all graphics-related products made by AMD.

Lisa Su, President and CEO of AMD said in a press release: "Mike and David are industry leaders who bring proven track records of delivering profitable business growth and leadership product roadmaps. We enter 2018 with incredible momentum for our graphics business based on the full set of GPU products we introduced last year for the consumer, professional, and machine learning markets. Under Mike and David's leadership, I am confident we will continue to grow the footprint of Radeon across the gaming, immersive, and GPU compute markets".

A few days ago we broke the story about virtually all graphics cards at insanely high prices, with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti selling for $1600 and even the Radeon RX Vega 64 selling for a huge $2100.

But now German site ComputerBase.de is reporting that NVIDIA isn't happy (about selling out of their graphics cards completely) and that they are targeting gamers, and not miners with their GeForce graphics cards.

NVIDIA said: "For NVIDIA, gamers come first. All activities related to our GeForce product line are targeted at our main audience. To ensure that GeForce gamers continue to have good GeForce graphics card availability in the current situation, we recommend that our trading partners make the appropriate arrangements to meet gamers' needs as usual".

Samsung has announced it is officially producing 16-gigabit GDDR6 modules, something that ramps bandwidth up to an incredible 18Gbps, up from the 11Gbps on the GTX 1080 Ti and its 11GB of GDDR5X.

Samsung's new GDDR6 modules are made on their industry-leading 10nm process, with Jinman Han, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering at Samsung Electronics explaining: "Beginning with this early production of the industry's first 16Gb GDDR6, we will offer a comprehensive graphics DRAM line-up, with the highest performance and densities, in a very timely manner".

He continued: "By introducing next-generation GDDR6 products, we will strengthen our presence in the gaming and graphics card markets and accommodate the growing need for advanced graphics memory in automotive and network systems".

There is another massive crypto mining boom that has rolled through courtesy of the massive spotlight being blasted onto cryptocurrency (with all the alts bleeding right now), and moreso into crypto mining.

Most crypto miners will look at the Radeon RX 570/RX 580 or GeForce GTX 1060/1070/1070 Ti, but with most of those being scooped up by miners, things aren't looking good. The prices of all GTX 10 series cards have risen, with the GTX 1070 Ti going for around $1000 on Amazon while the higher-end GTX 1080 Ti is $1050 at its cheapest, and up to $1600 for some of the custom GTX 1080 Ti cards from EVGA. Unbelievable.

This means you can get yourself NVIDIA's swanky TITAN Xp Star Wars COLLECTORS EDITION graphics cards for $1500, $100 cheaper than a custom GTX 1080 Ti that it most easily beats. Even for miners shelling out cards at this price, you're better off with the TITAN Xp which pushes 42MH/s mining Ethereum, compared to 35-38MH/s from the GTX 1080 Ti.

After going on a Twitter blast a few days ago with VideoCardz where I said I heard early rumbles of Intel working on its own next-gen discrete GPU, rumors are now floating out that Intel is indeed working on their own GPU.

Ashraf Essa from The Motley Fool is reporting that Intel is working on two new GPU solutions with codenames of Arctic Sound and Jupiter Sound, with the former being a 12th generation discrete GPU and the latter a 13th generation discrete GPU. Intel's Gen 9 solution is found on Kaby Lake while the Gen 9.5 solution is on Coffee Lake, while Gen 10 will come with Cannonlake soon.

We should expect them sometime after 2020, but with RTG boss Raja Koduri now on Intel's team, it makes sense. NVIDIA is fighting the good fight with their GeForce line up and virtually no competitor in the GTX 1080 and above space, but Intel could soon enter as a big competitor with their own Radeon-powered discrete GPU that does have me wondering: what's the future of Radeon under AMD if Intel can do better with Radeon GPU tech than AMD can.

NVIDIA is reportedly preparing some new GeForce GTX 1050/GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q products, which would really hit the mainstream gaming laptop market and crush everything AMD is hoping to do in the space with their recently-revealed Radeon RX Vega M GL product.

If you remember, Intel unveiled their new CPUs with Radeon RX Vega M technology inside, so NVIDIA shifting quickly with their GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q makes total sense. NotebookCheck have predicted GPU clock speeds of the purported GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q designs, where they think we'll see GPU boost clocks of 1417MHz on the GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q compared to the 1392MHz on the desktop GTX 1050 Ti, 1620MHz on the full GTX 1050 Ti mobile and 1455MHz of the GTX 1050 on desktop.