NVidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) Slows Down
tags: AMD,NVDA
After a significant rally in the wake of its first quarter performance announcement and report, NVidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) retreated a bit. The stock dropped 5.6% on Friday, in the wake of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and last closed at $45.24 per share.
The company’s stock went on quite a price hike over the second half of May, propelled by a great quarter. Revenues were up 13% on a year-over-year basis, hitting $1.3 billion, ahead of Zacks estimates for $1.26 billion. NVidia reported better-than-expected growth across a number of its product segments, from desktop GPUs to datacenter computing and Tegra chips in cars.
The company’s expectations for the second fiscal quarter are sitting at $1.35 billion in revenues, with a 2% error margin.
There is no doubt NVidia is doing a really good job, product-wise and its balance sheet shows that. However, we’re hours away from competitor Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) making its next big move. After struggling for years and logging significant losses in 2015, Team Red is rolling out its new Polaris architecture to consumers. Within another day at most, AMD‘s new RX 480 GPUs will be up for grabs in retail.
While NVidia has always dominated the high-end and enthusiast segment of GPUs, AMD has been very competitive in the mid-field. The new RX 480, while ostensibly slower than NVDA‘s GTX 1070, is fully VR-ready and will likely satisfy the 1080p gaming segment entirely, with a price tag of only $199 for the baseline 4GB version. Meanwhile, NVDA‘s own GTX 1080, despite being prohibitively priced at $699, still cannot churn a steady 60 frames per second at 4K resolutions in many new games.
How AMD‘s launch of the RX 480 will impact NVDA‘s GPU sales remains to be seen. Today a new image leaked, showing what is allegedly a GTX 1060, in Chinese-label packaging. If there is indeed a cheaper addition to NVDA‘s new GPU lineup, things will get really interesting and the competition for the mainstream GPU segment will be fierce.
