Nvidia Eclipses Intel As Most Valuable US Chipmaker (reuters.com) 31
Nvidia has overtaken Intel for the first time as the most valuable U.S. chipmaker. Reuters reports: In a semiconductor industry milestone, Nvidia's shares rose 2.3% in afternoon trading on Wednesday to a record $404, putting the graphic component maker's market capitalization at $248 billion, just above the $246 billion value of Intel, once the world's leading chipmaker. Nvidia's stock has been among Wall Street's strongest performers in recent years as it expanded from its core personal computer chip business into datacenters, automobiles and artificial intelligence. Intel, which for decades has dominated in processors for PCs and servers, has struggled to diversify its business after making critical stumbles in the smartphone revolution.
While Intel's stock has lost almost 3% in 2020, Nvidia's has surged 68%. Investors have been betting that the shift to working remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic will continue to fuel fast growth in Nvidia's datacenter business. [...] Despite Nvidia's meteoric stock rise, its sales remain a fraction of Intel's. Analysts on average see Nvidia's revenue rising 34% in its current fiscal year to $14.6 billion, while analysts expect Intel's 2020 revenue to increase 2.5% to $73.8 billion, according to Refinitiv.
While Intel's stock has lost almost 3% in 2020, Nvidia's has surged 68%. Investors have been betting that the shift to working remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic will continue to fuel fast growth in Nvidia's datacenter business. [...] Despite Nvidia's meteoric stock rise, its sales remain a fraction of Intel's. Analysts on average see Nvidia's revenue rising 34% in its current fiscal year to $14.6 billion, while analysts expect Intel's 2020 revenue to increase 2.5% to $73.8 billion, according to Refinitiv.
Wish they would start making chipsets again. (Score:4, Insightful)
During some AMD eras of the past the only good motherboards that didn't have the under-produced rare AMD chipsets where the ones with Nvidia chipsets. Good performance for the era, and everything seemed to work well.
I would like to see them do it again, chip sets are a bit different these days, but I'll bet they could still bring some value to the table.
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nForce chips had a lot of weird bugs. Depending on which generation you use is if the SATA RAID less reliable than a single PATA drive on any other chipset. It took a while for ethernet not to just hang on Linux all the time, probably because the open source driver was missing a lot of the undocumented workarounds.
Ultimately there wasn't a lot of money in making PC chipsets, especially when you do it badly and have lots of returns and complaints.
Re:Better than chipsets - entire systems (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a nice SoC, I have used it quite a bit. But it's not going to replace anyone's desktop. Even Chromebooks have mostly abandoned ARM, and tend to go for lower end ARMs than Xavier (or the older Parker).
The main problem with Xavier is the unit price. It's powerful, probably the beefiest GPU in an SoC, but at some point an OEM looks at this and then look at a two-chip solution from Intel or AMD at around the same price and decide that they'd rather have access to the x86 desktop market instead of the much smaller not-x86 market. The Xavier is a huge hunk of silicon, I don't see how economies of scale really makes much difference. TSMC is still going to charge something based on their own costs to manufacture the chip.
Jetson Nano is probably the better choice for those looking for a beefier Raspberry Pi like board. Runs linux, runs a mini desktop pretty respectably. About 1/4th the price versus the Jetson Xavier NX board. (the AGX is almost double the price of NX). I think only when you get into CUDA and edge computing is where the difference between the old X1 and X2 chips and the Xavier becomes apparent.
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Most of the opportunity for differentiated chipset is out the window nowadays. High performance IO goes straight to PCIe controllers on the processor package. The memory controller is now on the processor package. The chipset in practice is mostly relegated to lower speed roles, like USB, maybe audio (your video card is likely your audio nowadays) and being a PCIe root to slower miscellaneous devices the most important of which being NVMe (for now). To the extent off-processor chipset makes a difference it
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nForce and SoundForce were awesome. So was their Netbook system-on-chip.
I sometimes wonder why nVidia gave up on these markets. They were superior and elegantly integrated.
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During some AMD eras of the past the only good motherboards that didn't have the under-produced rare AMD chipsets where the ones with Nvidia chipsets. Good performance for the era, and everything seemed to work well.
I would like to see them do it again, chip sets are a bit different these days, but I'll bet they could still bring some value to the table.
I have all of my old but working computers going back to the 1990s and of them all, the only failures were nVidia chipsets, all of them, and Asus P55T2P4 motherboards which had lithium batteries which could not be replaced. Even my old VIA motherboards still work.
Trend confusion (Score:3)
As far as I know, Nvidia's datacenter business is hardware acceleration for neural networks. What does that have to do with remote working?
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While their headline grabbing has been about AI, they make a tidy sum on GPUs used in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (for rendering and for real time video encoding to stream desktop over internet).
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That makes sense; thanks for explaining.
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Sure. Though I doubt that VDI should be a large factor in nVidia's growth. If anything applications have been moving to be more browser based, making a browser-as-a-client a much more efficient strategy for remote work than streaming a desktop, where internet speeds make an already slightly annoying remote experience exceedingly annoying.
Intel owns fabrication plants (Score:5, Interesting)
It's amazing how fabless nVidia is valued higher than Intel who actually owns fabrication plants.
I don't understand the logic behind this.
Re:Intel owns fabrication plants (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Intel owns fabrication plants (Score:5, Funny)
Market cap is a guess at the future value of the company based on a recent collection of bets that the value of the stock will increase. Oddly enough that number happens to have picked by an AI system running on GPUs.
Re: Intel owns fabrication plants (Score:3)
The logic is that if you just bought crap shares, you declare them as "most valuable", so others will buy them, and you'll make top money off their dumb asses.
It's how the entirety of the stock market works. Either you are actively doing this, or you're a pawn in this.
And yes, the term "pyramid scheme" springs to mind.
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It's how the entirety of the stock market works. Either you are actively doing this, or you're a pawn in this.
I think you're overstating the situation. I expect the vast majority of stocks quietly reflect the best estimate of the earning potential of their companies. Some smaller set are over or undervalued because of some current fad or panic.
Finally, I'm sure many stocks have someone trying to pump and dump and the vast majority of investors know to ignore the noise. I think it's rare for the pump and dumpers to have much long term effect.
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No, a pyramid scheme requires an ever increasing number of suckers. Most stock market schemes work fine on a constant ratio of suckers to con artists.
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Intel owns fabs which are no longer state of the art. Nvidia doesn't own fabs, and can contract from someone who does.
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Overvalued (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite Nvidia's meteoric stock rise, its sales remain a fraction of Intel's.
Sounds like they're overvalued then.
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Despite Nvidia's meteoric stock rise, its sales remain a fraction of Intel's.
A nit: investors care about profit and return on investment, not sales. And to be technical, the textbook says they care about the net present value of all future profits.
Sounds like they're overvalued then.
Excellent. Time for you to sell. I haven't looked into the company at all but it wouldn't surprise me a bit. While investors are supposed to use NPV of future earnings, determining that value is black magic. Everyone has different assumptions and expectations. If someone tells you they can accurately determine the right value, smile, nod,
"Most valuable" = current playing ball of the gamb (Score:2)
Nothing to see here. This is completely unrelated to thr real world. Just some cokehead gamblers trying to induce the next Wall Street fashion trend by declaring something they just bought many shares of as "most valuable", so other dumb fucks will fall for their, essentially, pyramid scheme.
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