New Nvidia Chips, Mining Coins, Data science and Smart Cars

Gamers are always demanding the higher levels of graphics and tech companies and researchers both require greater GPU computation and AI, so the graphics cards always need to become better and better. That’s why Nvidia is hard at work developing the next generation GPU architecture, Nvidia Volta. What is it? Nvidia’s next-gen, 12nm GPU line. When is it out? The Tesla V100 and Titan V are out now, but GeForce cards are TBD. What will it cost? TBD.  Nvidia Titan V – released in December 2017 – is considered a consumer device, but you might scoff at the $2,999 (about £2149, AU$3800) price point. The Titan V is targeted towards researchers and other high-performance computing needs rather than making PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds look pretty. Nvidia hasn’t announced whether their next-gen gaming GPUs will consist of Volta or Turing architecture. But Gddr6 seems to be part of the next gen, GDDR6 video memory will ship in 8GB and 16GB increments. According to GamersNexus’ SK Hynix source, it will also cost 20% more than GDDR5.

Nvidia head Jensen Huang suggested last August that it’s still too costly to produce consumer-level gaming graphics cards at reasonable prices. Given that we didn’t see any GeForce announcements at CES 2018 in January, and since the Titan V just recently rolled out at that eye-popping price, it seems entirely possible that Nvidia isn’t going to rush out Volta-powered gaming GPUs anytime soon.We expect to see them in 2018, but our original expectation of a spring debut doesn’t seem terribly firm. A collection of interesting information is surfacing that points to a highly likely Q3 or Q4 2018 release.

Nvidia (NVDA) shares are up $3.79, or 1.7%, at $219.20. Morgan Stanley chip analyst Joseph Moore raised his rating on the stock to Overweight from Equal Weight, while keeping his $258 price target. Moore saw risk to both Nvidia and its only major graphics-chip competitor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). AMD has also benefited from sales into the crypto market. The cryptocurrency business concerns for Nvidia getting real now and the startup Bitmain Technologies has unveiled a custom chip for “mining” cryptocurrencies continues to worry some analysts covering chip giant Nvidia and now Nvidia stock is cheaper than it’s been, trading at 35 times forward earnings, versus a “recent peak” of 55 times, notes Moore. “Nvidia has grown at 4 to 5 times the semiconductor industry’s growth rate in recent years, and we believe that they can continue to do that,” “If we are wrong from here, we don’t think it would be about the multiple.”

His takeaway from the company’s GTC conference:

The longer-term debate is going to be NVIDIA’s data center products vs. cloud hyperscale custom chips, and longer term, startups within Intel, AMD, and venture backed startups. We have continued to monitor these debates with great interest, and will continue to do so; while a graphics chip is the best solution today for solving these problems, hands down, it’s not the best solution that customers can ever imagine. But in meetings with multiple customers at the company’s developer conference last week, it continues to be clear that the leaders in machine learning are building their products on NVIDIA silicon, with relatively high switching costs.

Tags: Nvidia,  NVDA, Nvidia shares, Nvidia Chips, Morgan Stanley, crypto market, cryptocurrency, NVIDIA’s data center, stocks, shares

Mohsen Daemi
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