Thread: Anandtech News

Hot Chips has gone virtual this year! Lots of talks on lots of products, including Tiger Lake, Xe, POWER10, Xbox Series X, TPUv3, and a special Raja Koduri Keynote. Stay tuned at AnandTech for our live blogs as we commentate on each talk.


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Hot Chips has gone virtual this year! Lots of talks on lots of products, including Tiger Lake, Xe, POWER10, Xbox Series X, TPUv3, and a special Raja Koduri Keynote. Stay tuned at AnandTech for our live blogs as we commentate on each talk.

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Hot Chips has gone virtual this year! Lots of talks on lots of products, including Tiger Lake, Xe, POWER10, Xbox Series X, TPUv3, and a special Raja Koduri Keynote. Stay tuned at AnandTech for our live blogs as we commentate on each talk.


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Hot Chips has gone virtual this year! Lots of talks on lots of products, including Tiger Lake, Xe, POWER10, Xbox Series X, TPUv3, and a special Raja Koduri Keynote. Stay tuned at AnandTech for our live blogs as we commentate on each talk.

More...

Hot Chips has gone virtual this year! Lots of talks on lots of products, including Tiger Lake, Xe, POWER10, Xbox Series X, TPUv3, and a special Raja Koduri Keynote. Stay tuned at AnandTech for our live blogs as we commentate on each talk.


More...

Hot Chips has gone virtual this year! Lots of talks on lots of products, including Tiger Lake, Xe, POWER10, Xbox Series X, TPUv3, and a special Raja Koduri Keynote. Stay tuned at AnandTech for our live blogs as we commentate on each talk.

More...

Hot Chips has gone virtual this year! Lots of talks on lots of products, including Tiger Lake, Xe, POWER10, Xbox Series X, TPUv3, and a special Raja Koduri Keynote. Stay tuned at AnandTech for our live blogs as we commentate on each talk.


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Today we are taking a look at NZXT’s latest liquid coolers, the Kraken X-3 and Z-3 series. These are more of a refresh rather a total upgrade over last year’s X-2 series, but NZXT has made some notable tweaks. Between the two families there are five different coolers in three sizes, covering the usual 240/280/360mm configurations. Both the X and Z series utilize the same cooling hardware, but NZXT has positioned the Z series as a premium option with a novel aesthetic feature – while the X series has RGB lighting on top of the pump base, the Z series tops its base with a full-fledged (and full color) LCD screen.

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Signaling the end to any remaining degrees of separation between Facebook and its VR headset division, Oculus, today the social media company announced that it will be further integrating the two services. Coming this fall, the company will begin sunsetting stand-alone Oculus accounts as part of an effort to transition the entire Oculus ecosystem over to Facebook. This will start in October, when all new Oculus accounts and devices will have to sign up for a Facebook account, while support for existing stand-alone accounts will be retired entirely at the start of 2023.
Originally an acquisition for Facebook, the Oculus Rift and underlying Oculus software ecosystem were initially developed by the then-independent Oculus VR group. After acquiring the company for $2 Billion back in 2014, Facebook has for the last several years largely treated Oculus as a stand-alone entity, selling products under the Oculus brand and leaving Facebook integration an optional feature – a feature co-founder Palmer Luckey even guaranteed during the 2014 acquisition.
None the less, Oculus’s days as a stand-alone ecosystem are now coming to a close, as Facebook has laid out their plans to transition Oculus users over to Facebook accounts, and the significant social media repercussions that entails.
According to Facebook, winding-down Oculus accounts will be a two-part process for the company. Starting in October, all new accounts will need to be Facebook accounts – or more specifically, users will need a Facebook account to log into the Oculus ecosystem. Meanwhile current stand-alone Oculus account holders will be grandfathered in for a time on their existing devices, however any future unreleased devices, even when paired with an existing Oculus account, will still require a Facebook login.
Facebook will then maintain support for grandfathered accounts through the start of 2023. At that point the company will officially drop support for stand-alone Oculus accounts, and while the company is not threatening to immediately disconnect or disable non-Facebook users, “full functionality will require a Facebook account.” In particular:

We will take steps to allow you to keep using content you have purchased, though some games and apps may no longer work. This could be because they require a Facebook account or because a developer has chosen to no longer support the app or game you purchased.

Ultimately, for Facebook this marks the final step of the Oculus acquisition, more fully integrating the company and its systems into the larger Facebook ecosystem. Facebook’s primary strength as a service provider to end-users remains its social offerings, so the company cannot fully exploit those strengths so long as Oculus users remain outside the Facebook ecosystem. At the same time, this will also give the revenue-generating side of Facebook significantly more access to information about Oculus users, which the company will then be able to use to use for targeted advertising, usage tracking, and other purposes.



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This afternoon NVIDIA announced their results for the second quarter of their 2021 fiscal year, closing out on an exceptional quarter for the company that set numerous revenue records. With over $3.8 billion in revenue, Q2’FY21 was not only NVIDIA’s biggest quarter yet, however for the first time NVIDIA’s datacenter revenue has surpassed their gaming revenue, the traditional cornerstone of the company. Thanks to the Mellanox acquisition as well as ongoing A100 accelerator sales, the datacenter market has, at long last, become NVIDIA’s single largest revenue segment.

NVIDIA Q2 FY2021 Financial Results (GAAP)
	Q2'FY2021	Q2'FY2020	Q1'FY2021	Q/Q	Y/Y
Revenue	$3866M	$2579M	$3080M	+26%	+50%
Gross Margin	58.8%	59.8%	65.1%	-6.3%	-1.0%
Operating Income	$651M	$571M	$1028M	-33%	+14%
Net Income	$622M	$552M	$917M	-32%	+13%
EPS	$0.99	$0.90	$1.47	-33%	+10%

For Q2’FY21, NVIDIA booked $3.87B in revenue. Compared to the year-ago quarter, this is a jump in revenue of 50%, making it not only NVIDIA’s best Q2 yet, but their biggest quarter overall. And while NVIDIA’s relative profitability took a hit due to GAAP accounting rules, the company still booked $622M in net income for the quarter, 13% more than in Q1’FY20.
Impacting NVIDIA’s results both positively and negatively was the Mellanox acquisition, which closed at the start of Q2. Mellanox added another 14% to NVIDIA’s revenue – all in the datacenter segment – helping to fuel NVIDIA’s new highs. At the same, however, closing the acquisition came with additional one-time charges for NVIDIA, cutting into NVIDIA’s profit margins. As a result, NVIDIA’s gross margin for the quarter was 58.8%, down 1 percentage point from last year, and several percentage points from last quarter.

NVIDIA Quarterly Revenue Comparison (GAAP) ($ in millions)
In millions	Q2'FY2021	Q2'FY2020	Q1'FY2021	Q/Q	Y/Y
Gaming	$1654	$1313	$1339	+24%	+26%
Professional Visualization	$203	$291	$307	-34%	-30%
Datacenter	$1752	$655	$1141	+54%	+167%
Automotive	$111	$209	$155	-28%	-47%
OEM & IP	$146	$111	$138	+6%	+32%

Breaking down NVIDIA’s revenue by platform, the big news here is NVIDIA’s datacenter revenue, which at $1.752B, has for the first time has surpassed NVIDIA’s gaming revenue. A significant contributor to this shift was Mellanox’s networking products, which contributed over 30% to NVIDIA’s datacenter revenues. But even without Mellanox’s gear, NVIDIA’s comparable GPU-centric datacenter revenue would be over $1.2B, surpassing even last quarter’s numbers.
Among several firsts, Q2 is also the first full quarter for A100 revenue for NVIDIA. Even a quarter later, A100 production is still ramping – and is nowhere near the majority of NVIDIA’s datacenter GPU sales – but the high performance (and highly profitable) accelerator is helping to further grow NVIDIA’s already sizable datacenter GPU revenues.
Overall, datacenter revenue overtaking gaming revenue has been a long time coming for NVIDIA, and an important step in the company’s long-term goal of diversifying beyond graphics. While it’s arguably taken longer than CEO Jensen Huang would perhaps have liked to see, there’s no longer a question of whether NVIDIA has “made it” as a compute company rather than a gaming graphics company – and this is a big factor in NVIDIA’s market cap recently surpassing Intel’s.
Meanwhile NVIDIA’s gaming revenue, even after being bumped from the lead spot in terms of revenue, closed out on another record quarter with $1.65B in revenue. This was up almost 25% on both a yearly and quarterly basis, with NVIDIA finding itself the unusual beneficiary of the current coronavirus pandemic. With people largely staying isolated and staying home, video gaming is on the rise, and according to NVIDIA this has also boosted gaming GPU and SoC sales.
Going forward, it will be interesting to see if gaming revenue remains solidly in second-place for NVIDIA, or if it and datacenter revenue end up jockeying for position. Both segments are expected to grow, especially as NVIDIA prepares for the impending launch of their next generation of GeForce video cards. A strong showing late in the year could give gaming revenue one more – and possibly its last – hurrah as NVIDIA’s largest segment.
Meanwhile NVIDIA’s professional visualization segment once again brought up third place for the company. That segment saw just $203M in revenue, which is down significantly both on a quarterly and yearly basis. After enjoying a mild bump in Q1 due to the coronavirus pandemic, office closures and other changes have begun suppressing ongoing demand, with both laptop and desktop sales declining. For the same reason, this has driven higher sales of virtualization/cloud products for remote working, but not by enough to offset PC losses.
NVIDIA’s automotive business was also a victim of COVID, with the segment pulling in just $111M in revenue for the quarter. This was down on both a quarterly and yearly basis, with the latter representing a 47% drop in revenues. According to comments made on NVIDIA’s earnings call, automotive production bottomed out in April due to COVID, hurting revenue for the segment.
ended up being something of a laggard for Q1’FY21. The segment booked $155M in revenue, which is down 7% from the year-ago quarter. NVIDIA’s automotive business moves at a much different pace than its GPU businesses – in part because it’s not set to really take off until self-driving cars become a retail reality – so the business tends to ebb and flow.
Finally, NVIDIA booked $146M in OEM & IP revenue for Q2. Among other things, this is the segment where NVIDIA books its entry-level laptop GPU sales, and it’s those products that helped to drive higher revenues here.
Wrapping things up, looking ahead to Q3 of FY2021, NVIDIA’s current predictions call for another record quarter. The company is expecting around $4.4B in revenue, and gross margins are anticipated to recover to above 62% as well. On the product side of matters, Q3 should see additional ramping of NVIDIA’s A100 accelerators, and almost certainly will see the launch of new Ampere-based GeForce video cards from the company as well.

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