First up, MarketWatch:
Nvidia’s latest server chips have now been adopted by AWS and Google Cloud, executive says Alibaba should be next
Nvidia Corp. attempted to show progress for its newest chips Monday, as Chief Executive Jensen Huang kicked off the company’s annual hometown conference.
At the keynote address of the 2019 GTC Conference in San Jose, Calif., Huang detailed new developments for the Turing-based equipment that Nvidia NVDA, +3.52% has rolled out in the past year. Most important was Nvidia’s announcement that Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +1.48% will now be using its T4 data-center chips, the biggest name that had not yet publicly signed on with Nvidia.
The Santa Clara, Calif.,-based chip maker said its T4 Tensor Core graphics processing units, or GPUs, would be deployed to Amazon Web Services through Elastic Compute Cloud G4 in the coming weeks. While other public cloud services have been chipping away at market share over the past few years, Amazon’s AWS still ranks as a global market-share leader in public cloud services.
“If you want to reach a lot of people, and you want to reach a lot of people fast, with the single largest compute engine on the planet, there’s one way of doing it,” Huang said in announcing the AWS deal as the keynote address stretched past two hours long.And from NVIDIA's blog:
Back in September, Nvidia announced that Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud Platform would use T4 chips in its data centers. In addition to Google, Ian Buck, Nvidia’s general manager of accelerated computing, said in a briefing that Baidu Inc. had adopted T4 chips for its data centers, and that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. also planned to announce adoption of T4 chips, with the last notable holdout being Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud service.
Nvidia has been seeking to pull out of a rough ending to 2018, when the company cut its outlook twice for the year’s final quarter because of weakness in China sales and in data-center and gaming sales. Part of the issue has been slow adoption of the company’s newest Turing chips, and Monday’s keynote was used to lay out more plans and adoption of the new equipment....MORE
GTC 2019: Huang Kicks Off GTC, Focuses on NVIDIA Datacenter Momentum, Blue Chip Partners
NVIDIA’s message was unmistakable as it kicked off the 10th annual GPU Technology Conference: it’s doubling-down on the datacenter.
Founder and CEO Jensen Huang delivered a sweeping opening keynote at San Jose State University, describing the company’s progress accelerating the sprawling datacenters that power the world’s most dynamic industries.
With a record GTC registered attendance of 9,000, he rolled out a spate of new technologies, detailed their broad adoption by industry leaders including Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo, and highlighted how NVIDIA technologies are relied on by some of the world’s biggest names, including Accenture, Amazon, Charter Communications, Microsoft and Toyota.
“The accelerated computing approach that we pioneered is really taking off,” said Huang, who exactly a week ago announced the company’s $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox, a leader in high-performance computing interconnect technology. “If you take look at what we achieved last year, the momentum is absolutely clear.”
To be sure, Huang also detailed progress outside the data center, rolling out innovations targeting everything from robotics to pro graphics to the automotive industry.
NVIDIA’s message was unmistakable as it kicked off the 10th annual GPU Technology Conference: it’s doubling-down on the datacenter.
Founder and CEO Jensen Huang delivered a sweeping opening keynote at San Jose State University, describing the company’s progress accelerating the sprawling datacenters that power the world’s most dynamic industries.
With a record GTC registered attendance of 9,000, he rolled out a spate of new technologies, detailed their broad adoption by industry leaders including Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo, and highlighted how NVIDIA technologies are relied on by some of the world’s biggest names, including Accenture, Amazon, Charter Communications, Microsoft and Toyota.
“The accelerated computing approach that we pioneered is really taking off,” said Huang, who exactly a week ago announced the company’s $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox, a leader in high-performance computing interconnect technology. “If you take look at what we achieved last year, the momentum is absolutely clear.”
To be sure, Huang also detailed progress outside the data center, rolling out innovations targeting everything from robotics to pro graphics to the automotive industry.
Developers, Developers, Developers
The recurring theme, however, was how NVIDIA’s ability to couple software and silicon delivers the advances in computing power needed to transform torrents of data into insights and intelligence.
“Accelerated computing is not just about the chips,” Huang said. “Accelerated computing is a collaboration, a codesign, a continuous optimization between the architecture of the chip, the systems, the algorithm and the application.”
As a result, the GPU developer ecosystem is growing fast, Huang said. The number of developers has grown to more than 1.2 million from 800,000 last year; there now are 125 GPU powered systems among the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers; and there are more than 600 applications powered by NVIDIA’s CUDA parallel computing platform.
Mellanox — whose interconnect technology helps power more than half the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers — complement’s NVIDA’s strength in datacenters and high-performance computing, Huang said, explaining why NVIDIA agreed to buy the company earlier this month.
Mellanox CEO Eyal Waldman, who joined Huang on stage said: “We’re seeing a great growth in data, we’re seeing an exponential growth. The program-centric datacenter is changing into a data-centric datacenter, which means the data will flow and create the programs, rather than the programs creating the data.”....MUCH MORE, including videoAnandTech's liveblog was less rah-rah but, if possible, even geekier:
The NVIDIA GPU Tech Conference 2019 Keynote Live Blog (Starts at 2pm PT/21:00 UTC)
04:43PM EDT - Alright, we're finally seated for the keynote
04:43PM EDT - Kicking off a very busy week for tech events in California, my first stop for the week is NVIDIA's annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose.
04:44PM EDT - As always, CEO Jensen Huang will be kicking off the show proper with a 2 hour keynote, no doubt making some new product announcements and setting the pace for the company for the next year.
04:44PM EDT - The biggest question that's no doubt on everyone's minds being what NVIDIA plans to do for 7nm, as that process node is quickly maturing.
04:44PM EDT - Hopefully we'll find out the answer to that and more, so be sure to check-in at 2pm Pacific to see what's next for NVIDIA.......MUCH MORE
From December 27's "Nvidia Slips on RBC Price-Target Cut" (NVDA):
It might be time for NVIDIA to start thinking about buying some young upstart chip designers.Since then the stock is up to $174 and instead of buying an upstart NVIDIA bought Mellanox, at the heart of the data center business.
Starting in May 2015 with the stock bouncing around $21 we were pretty rah-rah on the deal, eventually leading off each post with something like this from May 2016:...
... What I'm saying is: We know this one fairly well and are starting, depending on R&D or acquisitions, starting to get interested again.
$127.01 last, down $6.09 (-4.58%)...
...What the analyst doesn't mention is the data center business which, if our crystal ball is showing the right picture, will really start ramping about a year from now.
Which reminds me, there's a company I should introduce to Mr. Huang.
