Major artificial intelligence and graphics chipmaker Nvidia reported its 2020Q4 financials today (the company’s fiscal quarter ends on January 26th, 2020). The company announced revenues of $3.11 billion for the quarter, a jump of 41% from the year ago quarter and a small bump from the third quarter.

Even more importantly, the company’s gross margin improved remarkably year-over-year, moving from 54.7% to 64.9%. The company reported a net income of $950 million for the quarter. After-hours traders jumped into the stock, with Yahoo Finance reporting a roughly 6.32% increase in the company’s share price immediately following the earnings.

That positive news though didn’t overcome the full-year fiscal numbers though, which painted a more complicated picture for the company. Revenue was down slightly for the 2020 fiscal year compared to 2019, and operating expenses, operating income, net income, and diluted earnings all headed the wrong way, in some cases by more than 30%.

Nvidia’s struggles in 2019 weren’t unique to the chipmaker, as last year was bruising for the chip industry overall. The industry’s total sales declined the fastest in more than a decade from a number of factors, including less demand in some parts of the market, oversupply in other parts of the market (driving down prices and thus sales revenue), as well as on-going trade tensions between the U.S., China, South Korea, and Japan.

Nvidia itself has had a huge number of ups and down in recent years. Riding the crest of the crypto wave, the company’s stock soared as crypto miners sought the company’s GPUs, which were well-positioned to handle the hashing functions at the core of many proof-of-work crypto protocols. Yet, the crypto winter crushed the stock, which saw a precipitous decline of 50% at the tail end of 2018.

The past year though has seen Nvidia turn something of a corner. It started the year with a share price of around $150, and today closed at nearly $271, a gain of more than 80%. Part of that story — as it is with the rest of the chip industry — is the sense that a whole new set of workflows (and therefore markets) are moving to silicon, including in automotive, high-performance computing (where Nvidia acquired Mellanox for $6.9 billion early last year), Internet of Things, and even in 5G.

That excitement on the big corporate side has also shown up in the venture world as well. Startups like Cerebras, Nuvia, Graphcore and more are targeting these new workflows, putting pressure on Nvidia, Intel, and other incumbents to outperform these upstarts.

Japanese electronics firm Sony is the latest phone maker to announce it’s withdrawing from the Mobile World Congress (MWC) tradeshow — citing concerns about the coronavirus outbreak.

“As we place the utmost importance on the safety and wellbeing of our customers, partners, media and employees, we have taken the difficult decision to withdraw from exhibiting and participating at MWC 2020 in Barcelona, Spain,” Sony wrote in a press release.

MWC is due to take place in Barcelona between February 24-27.

Sony said it will now run a press conference planned for the event remotely, via its official Xperia YouTube channel, at the scheduled time of 8:30am (CET) on February 24.

“Sony would like to thank everyone for their understanding and ongoing support during these challenging times,” it added.

In recent days a number of companies have announced they’re pulling out or scaling back their presence at the conference as a result of concerns about the spread of the virus — including Amazon, Ericsson, LG, NVIDIA and ZTE.

The World Health Organization dubbed the emergence and spread of the novel coronavirus a global emergency late last month.

At the time of writing the majority of infections and deaths from the virus remain in China, where the virus was first identified — in the town of Wuhan in the Hubei province.

Several Chinese tech companies, including ZTE and Xiaomi, have said they will make changes to their participation in MWC related to coronavirus concerns, such as placing limits on staff travelling from China or requiring they self isolate in the period before attending.

Yesterday the organizers of MWC, the GSMA, also announced stringent rules to try to safeguard attendees, including a ban on travellers from Hubei and a requirement that all travellers who have been in China must be able to prove they have been outside the country 14 days prior to the event.

Attendees will also be required to self-certify they have not been in contact with anyone affected, the GSMA said. Temperature screening will also be implemented at the event.

Last year the annual mobile tech conference drew almost 110,000 attendees, from 198 countries.

“While further planning is underway, we will continue to monitor the situation and will adapt our plans according to developments and advice we receive. We are contending with a constantly evolving situation, that will require fast adaptability,” the GSMA also said.

Attendance at MWC has regularly broken 100,000 in recent years but 2020’s conference seems likely to mark a break with business as usual as companies face pressure to rethink their travel priorities.

After a lengthy beta phase, Nvidia is launching its cloud gaming service GeForce Now. Unlike Google’s Stadia, GeForce Now isn’t trying to build a console-like experience with its own lineup of games. Nvidia connects with your Steam, Epic or Battle.net account so that you can play games that you already purchased on those third-party platforms. It works a bit more like Shadow for instance.

But GeForce Now isn’t a free service. Customers basically rent a gaming PC in a data center near them. Right now, it costs $5 per month to access the Founders edition, which lets you play whenever you want and for as long as you want. But the company says that it plans to raise the subscription fee at some point.

You can try the service by creating a free account as well. If there are too many people connected to the service, you may have to wait to launch a game. You’re also limited to one-hour sessions and less powerful hardware.

You’ll have to download an app that works on macOS, Windows and Android devices including the Nvidia Shield TV. GeForce Now isn’t available from anywhere in the world as you have to be near a data center to reduce latency. The company currently has nine data centers in the U.S., five in Europe, one in Korea and two in Japan.

Nvidia is optimizing games for the platform one at a time. So it’s possible that you own a game but that it doesn’t appear in the list of compatible games. Yes, that’s a long list of restrictions. But it could be the future of gaming, maybe.

Behind the scene, the company uses Nvidia graphics cards (duh) that support ray tracing. Nvidia doesn’t share more details beyond that. I’d recommend testing the service with a free account first to see if your connection is stable enough to support game streaming.

Today at CES 2020, Sony unveiled a car. I’m surprised too. There are very few details about the Sony Vision-S sedan at this time. We’ll get more once we can see it on the show floor.

According to the press account, Sony partnered with industry leaders to build this prototype, including Bosch, Continental, Genetex, Nvidia, Magna, and Nvidia.

This car is a bit surprising but fits within Sony’s current strategy. Over the last generation, Sony started building and selling key technologies as a supplier. Sony camera sensors are found in many leading smartphones, including the latest iPhone Pro. But before it hits the iPhone, Sony has long produced its own smartphone with similar smartphone sensors.

Expect a similar play with the Vision-S sedan. This concept vehicle is clearly designed to help Sony sell components. Sony doesn’t want to get into auto manufacturing. I think. We’re asking Sony a bunch of questions and will relay the answers.

Today at CES 2020, Sony unveiled a car. I’m surprised too. There are very few details about the Sony Vision-S sedan at this time. We’ll get more once we can see it on the show floor.

According to the press account, Sony partnered with industry leaders to build this prototype, including Bosch, Continental, Genetex, Nvidia, Magna, and Nvidia.

This car is a bit surprising but fits within Sony’s current strategy. Over the last generation, Sony started building and selling key technologies as a supplier. Sony camera sensors are found in many leading smartphones, including the latest iPhone Pro. But before it hits the iPhone, Sony has long produced its own smartphone with similar smartphone sensors.

Expect a similar play with the Vision-S sedan. This concept vehicle is clearly designed to help Sony sell components. Sony doesn’t want to get into auto manufacturing. I think. We’re asking Sony a bunch of questions and will relay the answers.

Nvidia has developed new technology that enables 360Hz refresh rates on PC displays, achieving unprecedented responsiveness that’s perfectly suited to esports, where any advances in terms of refresh speeds can translate to improved performance during play.

Nvidia’s new G-sync tech that delivers the 360Hz refresh speeds will be coming to market first through a partnership with Asus, via the Asus ROG Swift 360 monitor that’s debuting at this week’s annual CES show in Las Vegas. It works in combination with Nvidia’s RTX line of GPUs, and will provide refresh rates that translate to less than 3 milliseconds of input latency, all available on a 24.5-inch, fully 1080p HD gaming panel.

Nvidia’s G-Sync tech debuted in 2013, and works by introducing Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) that syncs up the refresh rate of the display (provided it’s G-sync certified) with the GPU’s frame rate, so that you get optimized performance. Since its debut, Nvidia has been especially focused on optimizing G-Sync and its features for use by esports players and professionals, to ensure best possible reaction times in genres like shooters where every millisecond counts when it comes to aiming at and actually hitting your target.

The Asus ROG Swift 360 monitor will be coming out sometime “later this year,” and pricing isn’t yet available but you can bet it’ll be more than your average gaming monitor, given its advanced performance features and esports target market.

Nvidia has been on a wild growth ride the past five years. Surfing a wave around AI deep learning and cryptocurrency where its specialized chip architecture is among the highest performing, the company’s share price rose from the low $20s in late 2014 to eventually soar to almost $300 in September 2018. And then crypto winter set in, and within weeks the company’s market cap was sliced nearly in half as crypto miners canceled their orders and inventories at Nvidia started building up a glut of chips.

Since that nadir in late 2018, the company has mostly been on the upswing as it has pushed expansion into a variety of other verticals like automotive, most notably by announcing the purchase of Israeli chip maker Mellanox for $6.9 billion in an all cash deal.

So with its latest earnings announcement coming after the bell yesterday, the big questions were how it was continuing to navigate chip inventories, and whether its transaction with Mellanox would close. The company ultimately presented a bit of a mixed bag, and Wall Street seems to have barely budged on the stock price as we all wait resolution on some of the key questions facing the company.

Before we dive into the analysis, first the high level numbers for Q3, which ended on October 27: top-line revenues declined slightly to just above $3 billion, from roughly $3.2 billion in the year ago quarter. Gross profits were flat from a year ago, but net income was down 27% to $899 million, mostly due to higher R&D costs and lower income from operations. Earnings per share was $1.47, down from $2.02 a year ago.

Now though, there were some more interesting takeaways from the results beyond the sort of lukewarm numbers emanating off the income statements.

China trade war still affecting Nvidia through Mellanox

The Linux Foundation today announced that ONNX, the open format that makes machine learning models more portable, is now a graduate-level project inside of the organization’s AI Foundation. ONNX was originally developed and open-sourced by Microsoft and Facebook in 2017 and has since become somewhat of a standard, with companies ranging from AWS to AMD, ARM, Baudi, HPE, IBM, Nvidia and Qualcomm supporting it. In total, over 30 companies now contribute to the ONNX code base.

It’s worth noting that only the ONNX format is included here, not the ONNX runtime, which Microsoft open-sourced a year ago. The runtime is an inference engine for models in the ONNX format and I wouldn’t be surprised if, at some point, Microsoft put that under the guidance of a foundation, too, but for now, that’s not the case.

“ONNX is not just a spec that companies endorse, it’s already being actively implemented in their products,” said Dr. Ibrahim Haddad, Executive Director of the LF AI Foundation, in today’s announcement. “This is because ONNX is an open format and is committed to developing and supporting a wide choice of frameworks and platforms. Joining the LF AI shows a determination to continue on this path, and will help accelerate technical development and connections with the wider open source AI community around the world.”

In its own announcement, Microsoft stressed that it remains committed to ONNX and highlights the work it did on making it easier to generate ONNX models from popular frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras and SciKit-Learn. “We are proud of the progress that ONNX has made and want to recognize the entire ONNX community for their contributions, ideas, and overall enthusiasm,” wrote Eric Boyd, the Corporate VP at Microsoft in charge of Azure AI (not Microsoft AI). “We are excited about the future of ONNX and all that is to come.”

NVIDIA has a new family of Android TV-based streaming devices, as tipped early via a couple of leaks from online stores. The new NVIDIA Shield TV ($149) and Shield TV Pro ($199) replace the existing Shield TV generation of hardware, which debuted in 2017. Both new Shields offer new Tegra X1+ processors, which outperform the predecessor chip by about 25 percent, and make possible one of this Shield’s new highlight features: AI-powered 3K up-conversion for HD content.

Both Shield TV and Shield TV Pro also support Dolby Vision HDR content, as well as Dolby Atmos surround sound. The differences between the two devices center mainly around physical design, with the Shield TV adopting a cylindrical tube design, and the Shield TV Pro looking more like its predecessor (basically a small set-top box form factor). The Shield TV Pro also gets more RAM (3GB vs. 2GB), more storage (16GB vs 8GB) the ability to transcode 1080p streams when acting as a Plex Media Server, support for the SmartThings Link to turn it into a SmartThings smart home hub and advanced Android gaming support, along with two USB 3.0 ports.

Shield TV Review

I’ve been using the Shield TV for around a week now, and this is definitely a worthwhile upgrade for anyone looking to get the best possible experience available in an Android TV home theater device. NVIDIA has clearly done a lot to survey the market, look at everything that’s come out in the two years since it last updated this hardware, and delivery generational improvements that help it stand out from the crowd in meaningful ways.

Android TV now ships on a lot of smart TVs, and there have been many generations of Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices introduced since we last saw a new Shield from NVIDIA – all of which adds up to needing to really do something special to ask for $149.99 from consumers to invest in a new dedicated streaming media box. NVIDIA has always delivered a lot of value for the upfront cost of their streaming hardware, with consistent updates over the life of the devices that add plenty of new features and improvements. But this new hardware packs in some excellent features not possible with software alone, and that are also unique when you look across the options available in this category.

AI Upscaling

Chief among the additions NVIDIA has made here is the AI upscaling made possible with the new Tegra X1+ chip. You might have heard of ‘upscaling’ before, and you might even think that your TV already handles that well. But what you probably don’t know is that often content from streaming media sources doesn’t actually get upscaled by your TV, which means if you have a 4K display but are often watching YouTube or other services with large quantities of non-4K content, you might not be getting the most out of your hardware.

NVIDIA has addressed this with on-device 4K upscaling, which is powered by on-device machine intelligence that has been trained on a deep neural network to turn both 720p and 1080p signals into much sharper, 4K-equivalent images. Having used this on a variety of content, including media streamed from YouTube, non-4K Netflix content and stuff from Plex, I can attest to its ability to produce visibly sharper images that look great, especially on my LG C8-series OLED 4K TV.

The Shield TV’s tech is trained on popular movies and TV shows, and so does a remarkably good job of guessing what the 4K version of the HD image it’s looking at should properly look like. Considering that there’s a ton of content out there that hasn’t been made available in 4K, despite now a lot of TVs supporting that resolution, this is a big advantage for NVIDIA, and again one that they uniquely offer among their peers.

Dolby Everything

These new Shields also support Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, across more services than anything else out there on the market right now. These HDR and surround sound modes really do offer the best audio-visual experience you can get, provided you have TVs and audio output equipment that supports them, but what you might not know is that even on other streaming hardware that technically support these standards, they might not be supported across all services.

Shield TV supports Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos across Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Vudu and Movies Anywhere, so you should be getting the most out of these technologies, too. I asked about the forthcoming Apple TV+ service, which is rolling out to Roku devices, for instance, but NVIDIA didn’t have any news to share just yet – it does seem like it’s a good idea to stay tuned on that front, however.

Like AI Upscaling, Dolby support across everything might not seem like a big competitive advantage, but it’s absolutely a decision tipping factor for people who are looking for the best possible A/V experience in a home streaming device.

New and Improved Remote

NVIDIA is shipping the new Shield TVs with a brand new redesigned remote in the box. There’s a dedicated ‘Netflix’ button, which is a nice touch, but the remote overall is just an improvement over both Shield remotes past, and other competing remotes, in every way. It’s powered by AAA batteries (included) and it has a new pyramid-shaped body design that makes it easier and more pleasant to hold.

There are also lots of new buttons! Yes, NVIDIA actually put buttons on their remote control – what a novel concept! Whereas the remote from the last generation seemed to be adopting a lot of the questionable choices Apple has long been making on their remotes, this one feels like it’s made with humans in mind, with dedicated play/pause, back, forward, volume and other buttons. A wealth of buttons.

This remote also has automatic backlighting, which will serve you well when using it in a darkened room. Because of the bulkier body design, it also stands on its end, and there’s a lost remote finding function, too. Chalk up a win for human-centric design with this remote, it’s a joy to use.

Simple physical design

The design of the device is not flashy, but it is smart. There’s an Ethernet port, a power connector, an HDMI port and a micro SD card slot, dividing across both ends of the tube. This makes it perfect for placing behind a console or media bench, on the ground or next to your other power cables.

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It still provides hardwired connectivity options in case you do things like in-home game streaming or GeForce NOW cloud gaming, and it offers expandable storage via the microSD slot.

Bottom Line

NVIDIA’s new Shield is a great option for anyone looking for a versatile streaming device, with access to all of Google’s Play Store apps for Android TV, and support for the latest AV standards. It’s real bonus advantage is that AI upscaling, however, which is something that NVIDIA is uniquely poised to do well, and which goes a long way in making that $149.99 price point seem like a tremendous value.

The fact that NVIDIA is updating its Shield TV hardware has already been telegraphed via FCC filing, but a leak earlier today paints much more of a detailed picture. An Amazon listing for a new NVIDIA Shield Pro set-top streaming device went live briefly before being taken down, showing a familiar hardware design, a new remote control, and listing some of the forthcoming feature updates new to this generation of hardware.

The listing, captured by the eagle-eyed Android TV Rumors and shared via Twitter, includes a $199.99 price point, specs that include 3GB of RAM, 2x USB ports, a new Nvidia Tegra X1+ chip and 16GB of onboard storage. In addition to the price, the Amazon listing had a release date for the new hardware of October 28.

If this Amazon page is accurate (and it looks indeed like an official product page that one would expect from NVIDIA), the new Shield TV’s processor will be “up to 25% faster than the previous generation,” and will offer “next-generation AI upscaling” for improving the quality of HD video on 4K-capable displays.

It’ll offer support for Dolby Vision HDR, plus surround sound with Dolby Atmos support, and provide “the most 4K HDR content of any streaming media player.” There’s also built-in Google Assistant support, which was offered on the existing hardware, and it’ll work with Alexa for hands-free control.

The feature photos for the listing show a new remote control, which has a pyramid-like design, as well as a lot more dedicated buttons on the face. There’s backlighting, and an IR blaster for TV control, as well as a “built-in lost remote locator” according to the now-removed Amazon page.

This Amazon page certainly paints a comprehensive picture of what to expect, and it looks like a compelling update to be sure. The listing is gone now, however, so stay tuned to find out if this is indeed the real thing, and if this updated streamer will indeed be available soon.

UPDATE: Yet another NVIDIA leak followed the first, this time through retailer Newegg (via The Verge). This is different, however, and features a Shield TV device (no ‘Pro’ in the name) that has almost all the same specs, but a much smaller design that includes a microSD card, and seems to have half the amount of on-board storage (8GB vs 16GB) and a retail price of around $150.

We’re still very much in the collaboration phase of autonomous driving, since it’s looking still quite a ways off from being anything consumers can use on the regular. That means there’s plenty of opportunity for things like the new “Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium” (AVCC) announced today to form. This industry group includes Arm, Bosch, Continental, GM, Toyota, Nvidia, NXP, and Denso, collecting top automakers along with some of the leading chipmakers and tier 1 suppliers in automotive today.

The group’s goal is to work together in order to “solve some of the most significant challenges to deploy self-driving vehicles at scale,” which pretty clearly translates into putting together the collective efforts of some of those who stand to gain most from autonomy becoming a commercially viable technology, in order to speed up said commercialization. While self-driving has been an area of intense investment and focus in the past few years, it still has a ways to go before these companies can start really reaping the rewards of their investments in terms of revenue-driving businesses.

So what will they actually do to achieve this goal? Step one will be setting up a set of recommended specs, essentially, outlining what size, temperature, power consumption and safety standards AV system architectures and computers should adhere to. The idea is that by arriving at some baseline standards, the group will be better able to move from prototyping, which is expensive and low-volume in terms of output, to manufacturing and deploying AVs at the scale where they’ll truly become a viable commercial enterprise.

There’s more to this industry collaboration than just figuring out the specs range for systems, however: Participating companies will “study common technical challenges,” as well, meaning they’ll be putting their heads together to overcome the major, fundamental tech challenges that still act as hurdles to be overcome in getting self-driving vehicles on the roads.

And of course, though the initial founding group includes only those companies listed above, this new group is also open to new members.

Nvidia today announced that it has been working with VMware to bring its virtual GPU technology (vGPU) to VMware’s vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS. The company’s core vGPU technology isn’t new, but it now supports server virtualization to enable enterprises to run their hardware-accelerated AI and data science workloads in environments like VMware’s vSphere, using its new vComputeServer technology.

Traditionally (as far as that’s a thing in AI training), GPU-accelerated workloads tend to run on bare metal servers, which were typically managed separately from the rest of a company’s servers.

“With vComputeServer, IT admins can better streamline management of GPU accelerated
virtualized servers while retaining existing workflows and lowering overall operational costs,” Nvidia explains in today’s announcement. This also means that businesses will reap the cost benefits of GPU sharing and aggregation, thanks to the improved utilization this technology promises.

vComputeServer works with VMware Sphere, vCenter and vMotion, as well as VMware Cloud. Indeed, the two companies are using the same vComputeServer technology to also bring accelerated GPU services to VMware Cloud on AWS. This allows enterprises to take their containerized applications and from their own data center to the cloud as needed — and then hook into AWS’s other cloud-based technologies.

“From operational intelligence to artificial intelligence, businesses rely on GPU-accelerated computing to make fast, accurate predictions that directly impact their bottom line,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang . “Together with VMware, we’re designing the most advanced and highest performing GPU- accelerated hybrid cloud infrastructure to foster innovation across the enterprise.”