Nvidia has made significant headway in automotive and mobile gaming as revealed from its latest quarterly earnings call. The graphics processor company has logged revenue in fiscal 2015 reaching $4.68 billion, up 13 per cent from last year. Surpassing its own Q4 estimates, Nvidia reported a 9 per cent YoY increase in Q4 revenue at $1.25 billion.

Gaming platforms grew more than 30 per cent, automotive grew 80 per cent YoY. "Momentum is accelerating in each of our market-specialised platforms, driving record revenue in the quarter and full year," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia. Gaming, enterprise graphics, cloud (specifically mobile cloud for gaming) and automotive are Nvidia's target markets.

Nvidia launched its 256-core Tegra X1 mobile processor alongside automotive computers called Drive at CES in January for digital cockpit and situational awareness. "Drive is basically a mobile super chip, a mobile super computer, with a ton of software on top," said Huang.

Nvidia is banking that a digital cockpit with advanced graphics and surround vision combined with deep learning will lead to the self-driving car. "Those technologies, we believe, will help pave the path to the self-driving car," said Huang. Nvidia's role in automotive is mostly confined to infotainment today but "more people are starting to do what Audi had done with their really amazing virtual cockpit, where infotainment and digital clusters merged into one," said Huang. "With Tegra, with our automotive platform, we're able to easily merge the two."

Nvidia's strategy with Tegra "is to focus on automotive and gaming," stated Huang. And Nvidia's "DRIVE auto-computing platform is at the centre of the advance toward self-driving cars."

China is especially important to Nvidia's gaming business. Its 192-core gaming console GeForce GTX 960 GPU, introduced last year made a big hit in China. "GeForce is the largest game platform in China," said Huang, a market he said that historically hasn't had access to game consoles.

By: DocMemory
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