5 takeaways from the Nvidia GTC 2022 conference

Gaming: Nvidia’s new next-gen gaming product Ada Lovelace RTX 4000 series is launching in the October quarter and ramping into calendar year 2023, with MSRP 7% to 29% above the company’s Ampere GPU.

Since launching Ampere in 2020, Nvidia claims Ada can outperform it by two to three times in ray tracing capabilities, thereby “extending an already wide leadership in gaming.” Also, Ada’s 4nm architecture puts Nvidia GPUs on process node leadership vs. the competition (AMD 5nm, Intel 6nm) for the first time since 2018 (Turing).

AV platform: Chipmaker unveiled a more powerful Thor SoC for edge apps that replaces the previously announced Atlan chip. Thor doubles Atlan’s performance at 2000 tera operations per second (TOPS) and delivers eight times the performance of prior-generation Orin.

Thor will act as the centralized computer for cameras, infotainment and other uses, enabling Nvidia to provide an end-to-end autonomous vehicle platform (DRIVE). Thor will be used for industrial and robotics applications.

Data center: Omniverse Cloud provides Nvidia with the ability to deliver services over their own cloud. This represents an infra-as-a-service opportunity and extends the company’s software/services revenue run-rate to hundreds of millions.

Nvidia also aims to double data center energy efficiency with Grace server CPU’s 72x ARM Neoverse V2 cores and 500 GB/s LPDDR5X memory, vs. x86 offerings.

Nvidia underscored ambitions to become a system-level full stack provider, with Hopper HGX systems now in full production and the Thor SoC enabling end-to-end automotive platforms via hardware-software combination

Near-term inventory concerns in gaming and enterprise may remain, but Nvidia believes two quarters of Ampere inventory digestion has paved the way for a healthy Ada Lovelace launch.