In Search of the Perfect Investment

Nvidia is super neat, but super expensive. It dropped last week because it did well, but not well enough. And Wall Street didn’t like that it had written off cryptocurrencies as a ginormous market. Didn’t bother me one bit. In line with my own thinking on that dead-end market.

When you read stuff on Nvidia, all you can do is to come away thoroughly impressed. It’s in all the right places — from gaming to ray tracing, from driverless cars to data centers. The capabilities and speed of its chips for these markets will blow you away. They blew me away.

The Internet is full of adulatory stuff on Nvidia and its chips. But let’s start with excerpts from its recent quarterly conference call:

We had another strong quarter, led by Datacenter and Gaming. Q2 revenue reached $3.12 billion, up 40% from a year earlier. Each market platform, Gaming, Datacenter, Pro Visualization, and Automotive hit record levels with strong growth, both sequentially and year-on-year. These platforms, collectively grew more than 50% year-on-year.

And our developer ecosystem is getting stronger. In fact, we just passed 1 million members in our developer program, up 70% from one year ago.

NVIDIA now powers five of the world’s seven fastest supercomputers, reflecting the broad shift in supercomputing to GPUs.

This quarter, we started shipping development systems for DRIVE Pegasus, an AI supercomputer designed specifically for autonomous vehicles. Pegasus delivers 320 trillion operations per second to handle diverse and redundant algorithms, and architected for safety as well as performance. This automotive grade, functionally safe production solution uses two NVIDIA Xavier SoCs and two next-generation GPUs, designed for AI and visual processing, delivering more than 10x greater performance and 10x higher data bandwidth compared to the previous generation.

This quarter, we also introduced our Xavier platform for Jetson for the autonomous machine market. With more than 9 billion transistors, it delivers over 30 trillion operations per second, more processing capability than a powerful workstation or using one-third the energy of a light bulb. Jetson Xavier establishes customers to deliver AI computing at the edge, powering autonomous machines like robots or drones with applications in manufacturing, logistics, retail, agricultural, healthcare and more.

The whole conference call is here.

Gaming is bigger than Hollywood. And the other Nvidia markets are exploding.

From Nvidia:

There’s just simply no comparison to Turing. Turing is a reinvention of computer graphics; it is the first ray-tracing GPU in the world; it’s the first GPU that will be able to ray trace light in an environment and create photorealistic shadows and reflections and be able to model things like areal lights and global illumination and indirect lighting. The images are going to be so subtle and so beautiful, when you look at it, it just looks like a movie. And yet it’s backwards compatible, with everything that we’ve done. This new hybrid rendering model which extends what we’ve built before but added to it two new capabilities artificial intelligence and accelerated ray-tracing is just fantastic. So, everything of the past will be brought along and benefits, and it’s going to create new visuals that weren’t possible before.

Amazon delights me, again and again

It keeps improving its web site. It stays in the news with news and rumors — the latest being it’s getting in the Tivo PVR (personal video recorder) business. It’s also improving its ad business. This is impressive. Click here.

Everyone is dead

Everyone on earth had died. They await entry to Heaven.

God appears and says, “I want the men to make two lines. One line for the men who were true heads of their households and the other line for the men dominated by their women.

There were two lines of men. One was for men dominated by their women. It was 1000 miles long.

The other line had one man. A true head of his household.

God said to the long line, “You men should be ashamed of yourselves; I created you to be the head of your households! You have been disobedient and have not fulfilled your purpose. Of all of you, only one obeyed. Learn from him.”

God then turned to the one man and asked, “How did you get to be the only one in this line?”

“Certainly.” The man replied. “My wife told me to stand here.”

Harry Newton, who would have written a more detailed column this morning were it not for the totally awful Internet connection on my cruise ship, the Regent Seven Seas Explorer.  However, I am posting this column from the St Petersburg harbor.  That’s Russia. And the column did get through, I think. Today we’ll see how the Tsars (Tzars?) spent their money on social welfare programs No way, Jose.