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NVIDIA this afternoon has announced their results for the second quarter of their 2024 fiscal year, delivering what’s arguably the most anticipated earnings report of the season. Riding high on unprecedented demand for their data center-class GPUs for use in AI systems, NVIDIA’s revenues have been on a rapid rise – as well as their standing on Wall Street.
For the second quarter of their 2024 fiscal year, NVIDIA booked $13.5 billion in revenue, which is a 101% increase over the year-ago quarter. The company has, at this point, shaken off the broader slump in technology spending on the back of an explosion in demand for their data center products, and to a lesser extent the latest generation of their consumer GeForce graphics products. As a result, this is a quarter for the record books, as NVIDIA has set new records for everything from revenue to net income.
| NVIDIA Q2 FY2024 Financial Results (GAAP) | |||||
| Q2 FY2024 | Q1 FY2024 | Q2 FY2023 | Q/Q | Y/Y | |
| Revenue | $13.5B | $7.2B | $6.7B | +88% | +101% |
| Gross Margin | 70.1% | 64.6% | 43.5% | +5.5ppt | +26.6ppt |
| Operating Income | $6.8B | $2.1B | $499M | +218% | +1263% |
| Net Income | $6.1B | $2.0B | $656M | +203% | +843% |
| EPS | $2.48 | $0.82 | $0.26 | +202% | +854% |
Driven by their highly profitable, high-margin data center products, NVIDIA achieved a GAAP gross margin of 70.1% for the quarter. Coupled with their record revenue, this has resulted in NVIDIA booking a blistering $6.1B in net income, an 843% improvement over Q2’22, and even more than trebling their net income versus just the previous quarter.
And while high margins are not unheard of for fabless semiconductor companies like NVIDIA, it’s all but unheard of for a company of this scale to hit those kinds of margins. In the span of just a year, NVIDIA has gone from earning $6 billion a quarter in revenue to keeping $6 billion in revenue as profits. Suffice it to say, it’s very good to be NVIDIA right now – or at least, it’s good to be working in NVIDIA’s data center product teams right now.
Things seem set to continue going NVIDIA’s way, as well. The company, handily beating their already very bullish $11B revenue projection for Q2, is projecting a further 18%+ jump in revenue for Q3, to $16B in revenue. Which, if NVIDIA’s projections pan out, would afford a 71.5% GAAP gross margin. This would set a new round of records for NVIDIA, who in just the last quarter became a trillion-dollar market capitalization company, and as of this moment is already knocking on $1.3 trillion in after-hours trading. But with lofty projections will also come lofty expectations to perform, and to maintain that kind of performance for more than a handful of quarters.
| NVIDIA Market Platform Revenue, Q2 FY2024 | |||||
| Q2 FY2024 | Q1 FY2024 | Q2 FY2023 | Q/Q | Y/Y | |
| Data Center | $10,323M | $4,284M | $3,806M | +141% | +171% |
| Gaming | $2,486M | $2,240M | $2,042M | +11% | +21% |
| Professional Visualization | $379M | $295M | $496M | +28% | -24% |
| Automotive | $253M | $296M | $220M | -15% | +15% |
| OEM & IP | $66M | $77M | $140M | -14% | -53% |
Diving into the performance of NVIDIA’s individual market segments, the bellwether of NVIDIA’s product portfolio remains their data center segment. That segment posted $10.3B in revenue for Q2, not just setting a new segment record, but smashing the old record in the process.
NVIDIA’s data center segment has grown by leaps and bounds over the past year in particular, on the back of developments with large language models (LLMs) in the AI space, and the subsequent spike in demand for high-performance processors that can train and run those models. According to the company, the bulk of this additional demand has come from a mix of cloud service providers and consumer internet companies, with data center compute product revenue growing by 195% year-over-year. At this point NVIDIA is full speed ahead with the production of Hopper architecture (GH100) based products, and if a report from the Financial Times is correct, the company is now looking to triple its GH100 production, in anticipation of shipping over 1.5M units in 2024.
The jump in sales in their data center processors has also spurred on similar growth in NVIDIA’s other data center product segments as well. Networking revenue for the company was up 94% year-over-year, as customers have been buying up increasing amounts of InfiniBand hardware to wire up their GPU installations. Unfortunately, NVIDIA doesn’t provide a further breakdown here of how much of this increase is in the form of bundled sales – customers buying DGX SuperPods and other NVIDIA products that come with InfiniBand hardware installed – and how much of that is ad-hoc networking equipment sales. But either way the success of NVIDIA’s data center GPUs is good news for their networking division.
But NVIDIA’s success in the data center compute market also means that the company’s overall revenues have become increasingly imbalanced. In the last couple of years NVIDIA has gone from being primarily a gaming company to primarily a compute company to almost entirely a compute company. NVIDIA’s compute and networking segment sales – one of NVIDIA’s two canonical reporting segments – now make up 77% of their overall revenue, and the disparity is increasing. So while NVIDIA is doing well on the whole, the lopsided success driven by the generative AI market means that they are, at least for the moment, not very well diversified with regards to revenue.
Speaking of things that aren’t data center GPUs, NVIDIA’s gaming market segment recorded $2.5B in revenue for Q2. This is up a “mere” 22% versus the year-ago quarter, coming on the back of the launch of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 series products. Now that the company has finished releasing the full product stacks for both mobile and desktop, the company is enjoying a surge in sales as gamers are picking up the new hardware, and retailers have largely finished selling off old GeForce RTX 30 stock.
And while NVIDIA’s gaming revenue pales in comparison to the data center, this is otherwise a good quarter for that market segment. While it does not end up being anything near a record due to the most recent cryptocurrency rush blowing up NVIDIA’s gaming revenues a couple of years back, excluding those quarters, this would be one of NVIDIA’s best quarters for the gaming segment on a revenue basis. Diving a bit into NVIDIA’s historical data, gaming sales have grown by about $1.2B in the last 4 years, falling just short of doubling NVIDIA’s revenues there. Though it goes without saying that gamers are less enthused about the current state of video card prices that are allowing NVIDIA to afford such revenue growth.
Moving down the list, NVIDIA’s professional visualization segment finds itself in a weaker spot. The ramp of Ada Lovelace architecture workstation products has helped, especially in quarterly revenue, but at $379M in revenue, year-over-year revenue is down 24%. The professional visualization market has seemingly reached its saturation point, and while revenue ebbs and flows from one quarter to the next, NVIDIA has not been able to grow it significantly over the past several years.
The automotive segment, meanwhile, is NVIDIA’s final market segment to show growth for the quarter. That segment booked $253M in revenue for Q2, up 15% from the year-ago quarter. According to NVIDIA, the bump in revenue was primarily driven by sales of self-driving platforms, tapered by lower overall car sales (particularly in China).
Finally, NVIDIA’s OEM & Other segment was another that saw significant declines, dropping 53% to $66M. The company hasn’t offered any further details with this quarter’s financial results release, but in the previous quarter the drop was attributed to declines in GeForce MX GPU sales.
Given the rapid tear NVIDIA has been on in growing its revenues and profitability over the past year, half of the anticipation with recent NVIDIA earnings releases has not just been how well they’ve performed, but how well they expect to perform in the future. And at least for the next quarter, NVIDIA is projecting another set of record results.
For the third quarter of their 2024 fiscal year, NVIDIA is projecting $16 billion (plus or minus 2%) in revenue. That would be a 169% year-over-year jump in total revenue for the company, eclipsing the 101% growth of Q2. So long as NVIDIA’s data center sales remain high, the company seems set to remain on a growth spurt through the rest of the year, as Q2 is the first quarter where NVIDIA has been shipping Hopper architecture products in large volumes – meaning that Q2 is essentially the start of the Hopper architecture era from and NVIDIA sales perspective. And should NVIDIA beat their own projections by more than a fraction, then the company will book more revenue in Q3’24 than they did in all of FY2021.
The further expected growth in data center sales is also expected to push NVIDIA’s gross margins higher as well. The company is projecting a GAAP gross margin of 71.5% for the third quarter, beating Q2’s already impressive figures.
As for what NVIDIA is doing with their newfound riches, where they aren’t already investing more into data center GPU production to try to catch up with demand, NVIDIA is sinking their cash into stock buybacks. Already in the midst of a share repurchase program with $3.95 billion left, this week the company’s board of directors has authorized NVIDIA to buy back an additional $25 billion in shares.
Besides bringing NVIDIA slightly more private by removing outstanding shares, this is almost certain to further boost NVIDIA’s stock price, which like the company itself, has been on a tear this year. At the time of their Q1 earnings report, NVIDIA’s stock was hovering around $307 a share, for a market cap of around $755 billion. Now the price is at $471, and in after-hours trading it’s jumped a further 7% to $505 on the back of NVIDIA beating the street on their earnings report. As a result, NVIDIA is closing in on a market capitalization of $1.3 trillion, almost 4x the valuation of rivals AMD and Intel combined.
For the moment, at least, it would seem the sky’s the limit for data center GPU sales. NVIDIA is already unable to keep up with demand for Hopper products, and that won’t be changing in the near future. So, for as long as they can last for NVIDIA, let the good times roll.
Being a significant maker of peripherals in general and gaming peripherals in particular, Logitech cannot omit the content creators and streamers market, which is now virtually dominated by Corsair's Elgato. On Tuesday, Logitech said that it had acquired Loupedeck, a streaming controller specialist, enabling the company to address streamers with a dedicated product. Furthermore, the company plans to use Loupedeck's expertise beyond its controllers.
Streaming controllers is a dynamically developing and lucrative market. These controllers retail sold for $199 - $499 per unit, and the company also makes Stream Controller for Razer, which it is set to continue building even after it becomes a part of Logitech. Meanwhile, the latter gets a potentially profitable business with many opportunities beyond the gaming market.
The Loupedeck Live S Streaming Console
Loupedeck's streaming controllers are versatile devices that run proprietary multifaceted software that supports game streaming tools like OBS, Twitch, vMix, and Ecamm Live and applications widely used by content producers. The list includes programs like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro, and Philips Hue Bridge. They also support tens of profiles to adjust for applications and can be used for content creation flows outside the game streaming world.
Loupedeck's integration strengthens Logitech's ability to offer creative tools for a diverse user base, including gamers, live-streamers, YouTubers, and other creative professionals. The two companies share a skillset for creating products integrating hardware and software, though it remains to be seen how Logitech plans to use Loupedeck's expertise. The company says the takeover will enhance its ability to deliver personalized and context-sensitive control experiences across all its devices. This may indicate that Loupedeck's devices will continue to deliver on their promise or may imply that Loupedeck's expertise will be used beyond its controllers.
"This acquisition augments Logitech's product portfolio today and accelerates our software ambitions of enabling keyboards, mice, and more to become smarter and contextually aware, creating a better experience for audiences across Logitech," said Ujesh Desai, general manager of Logitech G, the company's gaming unit.
One crucial detail is that Logitech plans to engage and support Loupedeck's expanding developer community to spur additional innovation from third parties.
"Joining Logitech allows us to elevate what we are doing to the next level and exponentially broaden our audience and our impact to the creative process," said Mikko Kesti, Loupedeck's chief executive officer.
Corsair on Monday said that it had agreed to buy Drop, a leading maker of personalized peripherals, such as keyboards. The market for bespoke hardware is growing these days as many gamers want to have peripherals with distinctive looks and be able to modify their parts themselves. Corsair is particularly interested in keyboard-related assets of Drop.
"Personalized Keyboards that can be modified by the consumer is one of the fastest growing trends in the gaming peripheral space," said Andy Paul, Founder and CEO of Corsair. "Drop has proven to be one of the leaders in this space and with Corsair's global footprint, we expect to significantly grow the Drop brand worldwide. We are also excited to be able to offer specialized Corsair and Elgato products to the enthusiast community that Drop is engaged with."
Drop, formerly Massdrop, specializes in crafting a range of personalized peripherals, primarily focusing on custom-made DIY keyboards, aftermarket keycaps, and desktop accessories. The company often collaborates with other hardware makers to build customized peripherals designed with community input. For example, the company has teamed up with Sennheiser, Epos, and even Focal (a maker of ultra-premium headphones) for audio gear. An interesting detail about these collaborations is that end products were cheaper than those traditionally made by Sennheiser, Epos, or Focal.
In addition, Drop recently broadened its product line to include 'Battlestation' items, which represent a variety of items used by gamers, starting from stands, chargers, and cables, and extending to lightbars, carrying cases, and air dusters.
Drop's past collaborations include The Lord of The Rings and Marvel Infinity Saga for licensed keycaps, which have seen the Drop community actively selecting new color schemes, designs, and in-demand styles.
"Corsair is the ideal partner to help Drop grow and continue to fulfill its purpose of creating amazing community-driven products," said Jef Holove, CEO of Drop. "With a worldwide sales and logistics footprint, we will be able to make Drop products more widely available, faster, while retaining the enthusiast-led product development that has seen millions of fans trust Drop for their setup and hardware."
Drop is set to maintain its independent brand identity under Corsair's umbrella. Furthermore, the Drop team will handle all ongoing warranties, purchases, and customer service inquiries.
Sabrent has introduced one of the industry's first Thunderbolt 4 KVM switches, supporting displays up to 8K@60 Hz while also delivering 60W of power to host devices. The switch is aimed at creative professionals who want to use one monitor and set of input periphreals with two host computers.
The Sabrent Thunderbolt 4 KVM Switch is a compact aluminum candy bar that has three Thunderbolt 4-certified USB Type-C ports supporting data transfer rates of up to 40 Gbps and DisplayPort 1.4 Alt Mode, as well as four USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports featuring a 10 Gbps speed. Notably, the full speed downstream Thunderbolt ports allow the switch to be used with 8K displays running at a full 60Hz refresh rate, which requires virtually the entire bandwidth of a TB4 port.
Meanwhile, to make it easier to switch between PCs, the KVM switch comes with an external button that can be placed everywhere on the desk.
The Thunderbolt 4 KVM Switch from Sabrent supports USB Power Delivery 3.0, allowing it to supply up to 60W of power to Thunderbolt 4-connected host. In addition, its USB Type-A ports also support Battery Charging 3.2 support and can deliver up to 12W of power to any connected device. The device comes with an 120W external power supply, which is quite large.
Sabrent's Thunderbolt 4 KVM Switch is not cheap: it has an MSRP of $299.99 and is among the most expensive devices of this kind on the market. The unit can be bought either directly from the company, or ordered from Amazon.
Western Digital's 22 TB hard disk drives hit retail in July 2022, with a trio of products catering to the prosumer and business / enterprise markets. Today, the company is announcing an update to their portfolio of HDD-using direct-attached storage products - the My Book and My Book Duo. These products now come in new SKUs utilizing 22 TB HDDs tweaked for consumer workloads.
The My Book is an external storage solution that comes with a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A interface and utilizes a single hard disk. It requires an external power adapter. On the other hand, the My Book Duo is a dual-drive solution with hardware RAID. By default, the drives are configured in RAID-0. The product also includes hub functionality. It comes with a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C interface and also has two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A downstream ports. Both products come with 256-bit hardware encryption support (requires WD Security software installation on client system to configure and use passwords). The WD Backup software component is also available for both systems in order to enable easy configuration of backups.
Previous WD My Book Duo releases used WD Red hard drives, but the company has not publicly confirmed the nature of the 22 TB HDD used in the new SKUs. No performance numbers were provided, but it is expected to be in the same ballpark as the previous generation SKUs.
| Western Digital's WD My Book (2023) External Storage Devices | ||||||||
| Capacity | Transfer Rate | Interface | Dimensions | Model Number | Price | |||
| 4 TB | Up to 250 MB/s, depends on model |
USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A | Height: 170.6 mm / 6.7” Length: 139.3 mm / 5.5” Width: 49 mm / 1.9" |
WDBBGB0040HBK | $95 | |||
| 6 TB | WDBBGB0060HBK | $119 | ||||||
| 8 TB | WDBBGB0080HBK | $140 | ||||||
| 12 TB | WDBBGB0120HBK | $237 | ||||||
| 14 TB | WDBBGB0140HBK | $280 | ||||||
| 16 TB | WDBBGB0160HBK | $330 | ||||||
| 18 TB | WDBBGB0180HBK | $300 | ||||||
| 22 TB | WDBBGB0220HBK | $600 | ||||||
| Western Digital's WD My Book Duo (2023) External Storage Devices | ||||||||
| Capacity | Transfer Rate | Interface | Dimensions | Model Number | Price | |||
| 16 TB | Up to 360 MB/s?, depends on model |
USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C | Height: 180 mm / 7.09” Length: 160 mm / 6.3” Width: 100 mm / 3.94" |
WDBFBE0160JBK | $440 | |||
| 20 TB | WDBFBE0200JBK | $668 | ||||||
| 24 TB | WDBFBE0240JBK | $900 | ||||||
| 28 TB | WDBFBE0280JBK | $1200 | ||||||
| 36 TB | WDBFBE0360JBK | $1500 | ||||||
| 44 TB | WDBFBE0440JBK | $1500 | ||||||
The company already has the new SKUs available for purchase in the retail market. The 22 TB My Book is priced at $600 (commensurate with the pricing of the bare 22 TB drives introduced last year), while the 44 TB My Book Duo is priced at $1500. A $300 premium for a RAID-0 / RAID-1 controller and a couple of downstream USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports appears very steep, but that is the premium the company expects early adopters to pay (and is par for the course, based on how the previous My Book Duo SKUs were priced at launch). The single HDD My Book looks to be a cost-effective solution for consumers looking for an off-the-shelf backup solution with high capacity requirements.
Continuing our run of holiday buyers' guides, today we're taking a look at peripherals. Considering that a PC’s peripherals can easily outlive the main system’s components and usually stay the same even after several main system upgrades, they are often not given the attention they deserve. Keyboards are just such a component; it is the main interface with the PC, yet most casual users hardly stop to consider what would be the most practical/comfortable choice for them.
Mountain is a brand that you probably never heard of before in the gaming peripherals industry. The company was founded just a couple of years ago and they currently market only a handful of products. Despite their newcommer status, Mountain went reaching for the top with their first product releases. In today's review, we are taking a look at their mechanical keyboard, the Everest Max, a product designed to rival the best keyboards ever released.
Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs.
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