Our partners at NVIDIA just announced an amazing third-quarter, which cycled (see what I did there?) their stock price up 30%.
The bulk of NVIDIA’s present growth is in their bread and butter gaming business, where they sold $1.24 billion worth of GPUs in just the third quarter.
Headlines then mention NVIDIA’s datacenter business, where they sell GPUs to companies like Google and Facebook, which use the GPUs not for gaming, but rather for high-powered deep learning.
GPUs employ massive parallelism to stream games to computer monitors. One way to think of it is that every pixel on a monitor is doing pretty much the same thing, just with different inputs, which is how the colors change.
That massive parallelism turns out to be equally helpful for deep neural networks, in which every unit in the network is doing pretty much the same thing, just with different inputs.
The third and fastest-growing unit of NVIDIA’s business is automotive, which grew 61% year-over-year. Every automotive company in the world is pulling NVIDIA chips, particularly the DRIVE PX2, into their autonomous vehicles. These chips enable deep learning and other parallelized computations that help the car process data in real-time.
It’s a good time to be making GPUs.
David Silver 