Today NVIDIA announced their fiscal earnings for the third quarter of their 2017 fiscal year (and yes, that’s not a typo). NVIDIA has cracked the $2 billion mark for quarterly revenue, with earnings of $2.004 billion this quarter. This is up an impressive 54% compared to the same quarter last year. This record revenue follows a previous record for Q2, and NVIDIA is forecasting revenue for next quarter of $2.1 billion, plus or minus two percent. With this rate of growth, they will easily surpass their best yearly earnings ever which was $5.01 billion announced in January 2016. They are on pace for close to $7 billion for the year, which is a dramatic increase at a time when the core PC market is in decline. Gross margin for this quarter was up 2.7% year-over-year to 59.0%, and operating income was up 161% to $639 million. Net income for the quarter was $542 million, up 120% over last year, and earnings per share came in at $0.83, up 89% year-over-year.

NVIDIA Q3 2017 Financial Results (GAAP)
  Q3'2017 Q2'2017 Q3'2016 Q/Q Y/Y
Revenue (in millions USD) $2004 $1428 $1305 +40.3% +53.6%
Gross Margin 59.0% 57.9% 56.3% +1.1% +2.7%
Operating Income (in millions USD) $639 $317 $245 +102% +161%
Net Income $542 $261 $246 +108% +120%
EPS $0.83 $0.41 $0.44 +102% +89%

NVIDIA has done a decent job diversifying itself, but it’s core market is still consumer GPU sales. With the launch of Pascal, NVIDIA has maintained a very healthy performance lead, and that has certainly translated into sales. Gaming related sales for this quarter came in at a staggering $1.244 billion, up 63.5% compared to Q3 2016. NVIDIA gained more revenue in the gaming segment this quarter than all of AMD’s Computing and Graphics segment earned in their last quarter. Clearly there was some pent-up demand for the FinFET based GPUs after being on 28 nm for so long. Professional Visualization had a good quarter as well, with revenues of $207 million. That is a 9% increase year-over-year, although they did have a 3% drop in revenue compared to their previous quarter.

With the rise in GPU compute in the datacenter, NVIDIA has aggressively pursued this market, and it is starting to make some real inroads here as well. For Q3 2017, NVIDIA had revenue of $240 million in their Datacenter group, which is up from $82 million a year ago, or a 193% increase in revenue year-over-year. Datacenter revenue is now the second largest segment for NVIDIA, and only a year ago it was half of the professional GPU revenue.

Automotive continues to be a solid performer for NVIDIA too, and they’ve released quite a few SoCs specifically for this market. NVIDIA announced that it has an agreement to supply Tesla Motors the DRIVE PX 2 platform to power a new AutoPilot system in the Model S, X, and upcoming 3. With a maximum TDP of 250 Watts, DRIVE PX 2 casts off the mobile SoC constraints of the previous design, despite still having NVIDIA’s Denver CPU paired with Cortex-A57. With the continued investment in this sector, NVIDIA has seen strong growth here, and revenue for this quarter was $127 million, which is up from $79 million a year ago, or a gain of 60%.

Finally, OEM and IP had earnings of $186 million for the quarter, which is down slightly from the $193 million they earned a year ago, but with the recent announcement that they will power the Nintendo Switch, perhaps they will see some growth here in the future.

NVIDIA Quarterly Revenue Comparison (GAAP)
In millions Q3'2017 Q2'2017 Q3'2016 Q/Q Y/Y
Gaming $1244 $781 $761 +59.3% +63.5%
Professional Visualization $207 $214 $190 -3.3% +8.9%
Datacenter $240 $151 $82 +58.9% +192.7%
Automotive $127 $119 $79 +6.7% +60.8%
OEM & IP $186 $163 $193 +14.1% -3.6%

This entire year has been very good for NVIDIA, but this quarter in particular has seen some very strong growth. The best news for NVIDIA and their investors is that they are not just seeing growth in their diversified markets, although they are doing very well there, but the growth in their core market was incredibly strong as well.

Source: NVIDIA Investor Relations

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  • Nagorak - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link

    I see a lot of Nvidia cheerleaders posting here, and there is no doubt Nvidia has been doing better than AMD. That's hardly breaking news. It's been a tough few years for AMD. However as you point out AMD has gotten themselves a solid base to build off of by becoming the standard for both major consoles. AMD is currently in a rebuilding phase, and it looks like they're doing what is necessary to get themselves back in the game.
  • CiccioB - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link

    Are you talking about the future? Aren't 9 years enough to fill the gap?
    What we should wait? The entire gaming market making game engines optimized only for AMD HW? Would that be enough to grant AMD some advantages over the competition?
  • CiccioB - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link

    They aged better for the simple reason that they were unbalanced and more computing capable than, for example, geometry capable.
    It was due to the development of heavier and heavier shader code that they finally managed to overcome the competition that was (and still is) more balanced.
    Infact most of AMD computing advantage has gone against Maxwell that is more effective at GPGPU than Kepler was.

    It requires a 9 TFLOPS GPU (like Fiji) to equal GM200 that has only 5.6TFLOPS computing capacity. And last Polaris 10 is in the same league as the 970 (and under 980) despite being faster (on chart) than that old Maxwell chip.
    So it was true that latest shifting to more computing centric engines made GCN age better than Kepler, but it ends there as GCN 1.2 has not aged better than Maxwell and for other reason they are even much worse (see the tiny GM106 vs Tonga or the 4GB limited Fiji vs GM200).
    So it was not a "future proof" vision but the luck that (or the ability to steer) the games engine shifted more to pixel shading instead of geometry shading (as with that even doubling shaders and power consumption would have not helped "future proof" AMD architecture).

    Polaris has not new feature that can make it battle against Pascal better than GCN 1.2 could against Maxwell.
    And it is still power hungry. It is at the level of old generation in efficiency, something that never happened before. Even GF100 was inefficient but could still reach the highest rank on podium. Here we have inefficiency and low rank. Nothing that can be considered good for the future unless you consider the price the card is sold at, which is a lower tier than it was thought to be placed.
  • medi03 - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link

    Chizow?
  • TristanSDX - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link

    Let AMD stop sales of CPU and GPU and buy shares of NV and Intel. Without competition, NV and Intel will raise prices and their shares rapidly skyrocket, and AMD earn more cash and much faster than selling their current products.
  • smilingcrow - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link

    Pure capitalism at it's finest.
  • AnotherGuy - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link

    I just dont get some people here who get so happy at nvidia's numbers and speak like nvidia is their mother or father... they are making too much money out of customers like you who buy cards at ridiculous prices... jeez
  • HollyDOL - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link

    When I remember cost of my first (parents') PC 25 years ago, cost of GTX 1080 doesn't seem that much tbh. I would lie if I wouldn't be happier to get one for half the price, though put in long time price/wages point of view, it's a bargain.
  • Nagorak - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link

    I wouldn't describe the 1080 as a bargain in any respect, despite the fact I own one myself. It's definitely a luxury type purchase.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link

    From a historical perspective it is a bargain. But that can be said of most any electronic component. I think the value of the GPU compared to other components in a gaming system has been going up. From that perspective, although inflation-adjusted prices have only come down a little, value per dollar has still been going up. VR will only continue that trend, especially if it starts to rely on accelerated physical simulations.

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