NVIDIA Announce Big Quarterly and Annual Growth

(Image courtesy of NVIDIA.)

On a recent quarterly conference call, NVIDIA's brass crowed over its new success. According to the company, quarterly revenue had grown by 55 percent to $2.17 billion, and annual revenue nearly reached $7billion. Both figures were a record for the graphics firm.

Although NVIDIA has released a number of splashy products this year, including an AI-focused GPU, and another board meant to “transform a workstation into a supercomputer,” one has to wonder exactly what’s driving this spike in growth. According to Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, "We had a great finish to a record year, with continued strong growth across all our businesses. Our GPU computing platform is enjoying rapid adoption in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, gaming and autonomous vehicles.”

One industry that was conspicuously left out of that litany was the CAD industry.

While it might be a bit speculative to say, I believe that the CAD industry is only just beginning to gain the tools necessary to need GPU computing. For CAD users, tools like generative design, where geometry can be optimized to meet defined design constraints by a computer, are only just emerging. Likewise, VR simulations and interrogation tools are still in a nascent stage, and designers aren't completely sure how they'll use the technology—or if they will at all. One area of CAD that has embraced the GPU computing revolution has been multiphysics simulation. With multiple GPUs tied together on one machine and over a network, extremely granular studies of a design’s mechanical, fluid and other dynamics can be run. These machine-based studies are invaluable to today's design world where time to market is shrinking and just like the room for even the faintest design flaw.

But beyond my CAD tangent, the question remains, can this growth continue for NVIDIA?

A few market analysts are skeptical. However, if cloud computing, the need for cancer detection and large computer vision problems remain on the horizon, NVIDIA should be able to rake in a steady profit. Maybe it won't be as explosive, but the company should continue to grow as more and more players begin to leverage AI and deep learning computing techniques. And hey, if the CAD market ever gets its hands on powerful generative design tools, then maybe it will join the fray of industries leading this GPU computing charge.