NVIDIA Corp (NVDA) — Q3 2015 Earnings Call Transcript

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to NVIDIA's conference call for the third quarter of fiscal 2015. With us on the call today from NVIDIA is Jen-Hsun Huang, President and Chief Executive Officer. First, I’d like to remind you that today’s call is being webcast on NVIDIA’s Investor Relations website. It is also being recorded. You can hear a replay by telephone until November 13, 2014. The webcast will be available for replay up until next quarter’s conference call to discuss Q4 financial results. The contents of today’s call are NVIDIA’s property. It cannot be reproduced or transcribed without our prior written consent. During the course of this call, we may make forward-looking statements based on current expectations. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. For a discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today’s earnings release, our most recent Form 10-Q, and the reports that we may file on Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All of our statements are made as of today, November 6, 2014, based on information currently available to us. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements. During this call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in our CFO commentary, which is posted on our website. With that, let’s start. Third quarter results were strong, with record revenue and improved performance in each of our businesses. Our focus on creating platforms for PC, mobile, and datacenter is paying off. Our PC gaming platform benefited from the enthusiastic reception of our new flagship GeForce GTX gaming processors based on Maxwell. Our 10th generation GPU architecture, Maxwell, sets new standards for performance and power efficiency, introducing a range of new features for gamers and game developers. Real-time dynamic global illumination is a leap forward in replicating the true interaction of light in the gaming environment. Other new technologies render games at higher frame rates with very low power, heat, and noise. Both the desktop versions of these processors, the GTX 980 and the GTX 970, and their notebook counterparts have won extraordinary support from reviewers. Forbes wrote of our new GPUs: They are higher performing and more power efficient than the previous generation, and design wins abound. That’s pretty much a trifecta in the mobile market. Commenting on the desktop versions, Hardware Canucks called the GTX 980 a market-changing graphic card that is backed by an impressive GPU architecture. We launched Maxwell in a groundbreaking event for the gaming community called Game 24. This live stream 24-hour celebration included gaming tournaments, modding competitions, and celebrity commentators. As it moved across the globe, all along the way we drew more than 1.3 million Twitch viewers in 120 countries. In the mobile platform space, the SHIELD tablet, the latest extension of our SHIELD family of devices, enjoyed solid demand during the quarter. The ultimate tablet made for gamers, it features the extreme performance of the Tegra K1 mobile processor and the precision control of the SHIELD wireless controller. SHIELD tablet sales have extended into many worldwide markets, and the 32-gigabyte LTE model has been recently added to the lineup. Very soon, the SHIELD tablet will be upgraded to Google’s latest OS, Android 5.0 Lollipop. Tegra K1 was also featured in the Google Nexus 9 tablet launched last month in a 64-bit version. Powered by our Project Denver CPU, Tegra K1 is the first ARM processor for Android to take advantage of the Android 5.0 support for 64-bit architectures. Tegra K1 is also now in Chromebooks from Acer and HP. Tegra technology continues to make strong headway in the automotive segment as well. Last month, at the Paris Auto Show, Honda announced that three of its popular models will come standard in the European market with a Tegra-based infotainment and navigation system. This marks the first in-vehicle infotainment system to use the Android operating system running on Tegra. Tegra will enable Honda Connect to deliver a touchscreen experience like the intuitive experience you'd expect from a phone or tablet, with crisp graphics that respond instantly to gestures like pinch, zoom, and swipe, but is designed for safe operation in a car. Honda now joins Volkswagen in our stable of mainstream auto brands relying on Tegra, complementing luxury brands like Audi, BMW, Lamborghini, and Tesla Motors. Our enterprise businesses also had a strong quarter, benefiting from new products and industry trends that fuel demand for them. Our Quadro professional solutions, including processors based on the new Maxwell GPU architecture, are enjoying the fastest ramp-up of any Quadro product in our history. They are being shipped by all of our major OEMs and adopted by global enterprise companies. This new lineup provides up to two times improvement in application performance and data handling capability. In the datacenter platform space, NVIDIA GRID graphics virtualization continues to gain momentum. Thousands of companies have come forward worldwide to experience cloud-based GPU-accelerated virtual desktops through our tri-grid online demonstration. Also, a program we launched in August with VMware for early customer access to GRID virtualized GPUs is drawing wide global interest. Initial customers include aircraft maker Airbus, the international construction group CH2M Hill, and healthcare provider MetroHealth. Other early notable GRID customers include Villanova University and Halliburton. Our Tesla accelerated datacenter platform continues to grow as HPC customers and cloud service providers deploy large Tesla-powered systems. Fueling Tesla growth is the rapid rise of machine learning, particularly among mobile web service companies like China Baidu that are standardizing on Tesla as their common platform. As noted in the story in the current issue of Wired, GPUs are exceptionally well suited for parallel processing tasks, like speech recognition, image processing, and natural language processing. IBM unveiled its first open power-based system featuring Tesla GPU accelerators, which can significantly enhance Java, Big Data, and technical computing applications. IBM announced plans to accelerate their enterprise applications using Tesla GPUs, including their nearly pervasive IBM Db2 with blue database software. We are excited about this month's Supercomputing 2014 conference in New Orleans, where we will be demonstrating the latest breakthroughs in supercomputing and visualization based on our Tesla accelerated computing platform. Now let’s take a more detailed look at the financials. Revenue growth year-over-year was driven by the strength of GeForce GPUs for gaming related to our launch in Q3 of Maxwell GTX GPUs, as well as the strength in datacenter GPUs and Auto Infotainment Systems. GPU business revenue grew 13% from a year earlier. Revenue from GeForce GPUs for gaming desktops and notebooks grew 36%, fueled by continued strength in PC gaming, including Maxwell. Within this segment, gaming notebooks performed particularly well, more than doubling from year-ago levels. Tesla for high-performance computing increased strongly, representing another record quarter of revenue driven by large project wins with cloud service providers and government customers. Quadro revenue remained strong, with our new product platform launched in August delivering industry-leading graphics and rendering performance. Tegra processor sales grew 51% from a year-ago, led by auto infotainment systems, mobile devices, embedded systems, and the onset of the SHIELD tablet sales. Auto Infotainment Systems revenue nearly doubled year-over-year. Revenue was up 11% from the second quarter of fiscal 2015. Moving to gross margins. GAAP gross margin was 55.2%, in-line with our outlook for the quarter, down 90 basis points from last quarter. Non-GAAP gross margin was 55.5%, also in-line with our outlook and down 90 basis points sequentially. The gross margin reflected continued strength in our GPU margins for PC platforms, inclusive of the product transition to Maxwell-based GPUs for the desktop, notebook, and workstation. Our margins from the above-mentioned PC platforms and datacenter and cloud GPUs were partially offset by the impact of Tegra processor margins, which are lower than the Company’s overall average. GAAP operating expenses for the third quarter were $463 million, in line with our outlook and up 2% from Q2. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $415 million, lower than our outlook and inclusive of legal fees associated with our litigation against Samsung and Qualcomm. The operating expense discipline reflects continued management of our investment in both R&D and capital expenditures to enhance our return on invested capital. GAAP operating income was $213 million, up 51% from the prior year’s third quarter, reflecting strong revenue growth from higher margin GPUs and contained operating expenses. GAAP net income was $173 million, up 45% from a year earlier, driven by increased operating profit from strong revenue and margins. GAAP earnings per diluted share of $0.31 increased 55% from $0.20 per diluted share in the year-ago quarter, reflecting net income growth and share repurchases. Now turning to some key balance sheet items. During the third quarter, we paid $46 million in cash dividends and repurchased 16.8 million shares under a structured repurchase agreement entered into during the quarter. During the first three quarters of fiscal year ’15, we paid $140 million in cash dividends and repurchased 44.2 million shares. As a result, we have returned to shareholders $950 million during the first three quarters of fiscal year ’15. Since the restart of our capital return program in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2013, we have returned approximately $2.17 billion. This return represents 136% of our cumulative free cash flow for fiscal years 2013, 2014, and 2015 to date and reflects the acceleration of our capital return program from cash generated in prior years. As we transition into fiscal year ’16, as part of our ongoing commitment to deliver shareholder value through capital return, we are pleased to announce our intention to return approximately $600 million to shareholders through ongoing quarterly cash dividends and share repurchases in fiscal year 2016. Accounts receivable at the end of Q3 were $563 million, up from $470 million in Q2. The sequential increase was primarily due to the mid-quarter launch of our Maxwell-based GPUs and the late quarter project shipments in our database business, compared with last quarter. DSO at quarter end was 42 days, up from 39 days in Q2. Inventory at the end of Q3 was $408 million, up from $387 million in the prior quarter. The sequential increase included the ramping of Maxwell-based GPUs coupled with decreases in products based on previous-generation architectures. DSI at quarter-end was 68 days, down from 73 days at the end of Q2. Cash flow from operating activities was $216 million, up from $96 million in the prior quarter, and from $162 million a year earlier. Our operating cash flow grew 33% year-over-year, reflecting higher net income from revenue growth and contained operating expenses, partially offset by higher accounts receivable. Free cash flow was $176 million in the third quarter. Depreciation and amortization expense amounted to $55 million, and capital expenditures were $40 million. Now turning to the outlook for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015. We expect revenue for the fourth quarter to be $1.2 billion, plus or minus 2%. The year-over-year growth is reflective of our continued strength in gaming for the PC, the notebook, and mobile platforms. Additionally, we expect growth from our enterprise platforms. Our GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be 55.2% and 55.5% respectively, plus or minus 50 basis points. The gross margin outlook is in line with our gross margin results in Q3, as high-end GTX GPUs and datacenter results will contribute to the strong gross margins. GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $470 million and non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $422 million, inclusive of legal fees associated with our litigation against Samsung and Qualcomm. Excluding these legal fees, we expect operating expenses to remain near Q3 levels. GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 are both expected to be 18%, plus or minus 1%. This estimate is a percentage point lower than our previous outlook and is consistent with our tax rate in the third quarter, excluding any discrete tax events. We are pleased with our record revenue for both the quarter and year-to-date, with strength across all platforms and businesses. Profitability, as measured by earnings per diluted share, increased 55% for the first nine months of fiscal 2015 compared with the prior year. Our 10th generation GPU Maxwell displayed a strong showing with stellar reviews and an innovative launch. We continue to embark on large engagements in datacenter and cloud with outstanding partners, IBM, HP, Dell, Citrix, and VMware. Auto continues to gain ground with continued wins, including Honda this quarter. Tegra K1, through SHIELD and Nexus 9, continues to be praised for its technological achievement and expansion of Android gaming. We continue our transformation into a business focused on visual computing platforms, allowing us to realize continued success in consumer PC and mobile gaming, as well as in cloud datacenters, supercomputers, professional design, and automobiles. That concludes our prepared remarks. We will now take questions. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up.

First question I have is just to go deeper on some of the PC gaming trends. Could you talk a little bit about how much strength you saw from a seasonal perspective for PC gaming and how much of it might have been from the new Maxwell product launch?

Yes, Stephen. First of all, you know that the gaming business is expanding globally. And we’re seeing great strength in Asia. We’re seeing great strength in developing countries. We’re seeing incredible enthusiasm around MOBA, which is an online battle arena gameplay style. It’s crossing over from being just video games to now being e-sports. And so the cultural implication of video games is getting greater and greater. There are several factors that drive our gaming business. One is whenever we see a really exciting new game come to market, games like Assassin's Creed or Batman or some of the amazing Ubisoft games that we’ve been seeing, Battlefield, Call of Duty, these incredible franchises that have millions of followers. The second factor is whenever we introduce a new GPU architecture that is a huge leap from previous generations. Right now, one of the most exciting things going on is driving beyond 1080p. 4k monitors are getting more and more cost-effective. And without something like Maxwell, it's really hard to enjoy the full fidelity of a 4k display. And so these things all contribute. But I think at the highest level, gaming is just expanding globally. And now with Maxwell and a brand new architecture that gives us a huge leap from the previous generation, we’re going to attract people to upgrade to Maxwell so that they can take their gaming experience to the next level. Now for the near term, Q3, of course, we benefited tremendously from the Maxwell launch. Overall for the year, PC gaming for us was up over 30%. That gives you a sense of how PC gaming is expanding. Going into Q4, you’re going to see some pretty amazing franchise titles coming out. It's the holiday season. And so we’re looking forward to quite a good year in PC gaming. But overall, PC gaming is expanding.

Okay, great. That’s helpful. And for my follow-up, just to touch upon the GRID business, so you mentioned the early customer access program for GRID with VMware. Any thoughts on the timing for how long that qualification cycle might take? And what kind of brand profile we might expect going into next year for GRID and Tegra as a whole? Thank you.

Our datacenter business overall had a record quarter. And we’re seeing expansion in our datacenter business in multiple ways. And I appreciate you recognizing GRID. We entered into a partnership with VMware to support early adopters of vSphere, which is supporting our GRID Virtual GPU technology. With this VMware and GRID platform, you can now virtualize all of the enterprise, all the way out to the clients, and you can make it possible for the most graphics-intensive applications. Whether new or legacy PC applications, you can now virtualize it, streaming the graphics to any heterogeneous device that your company decides to support. We’re seeing enthusiasm all over the world. In fact, since we announced this collaboration with them to develop the market together, we’ve seen thousands of companies try GRID. It’s easy to try. You might want to try it yourself. Just type in 'try GRID' on the web and it will take you to a website, and you can download a small client and enjoy the GRID experience and see what it’s like. We have thousands of interested companies. We’ve selected many around the world. Many of them are very large enterprises, who have several different needs. Some companies, because their campus is quite large, find it hard for IT departments to support all of the various workstations and PCs that are scattered all over campus. Universities are the same way. Sometimes it’s because the workforce has large fluctuations. Maybe they use a lot of contractors, or maybe it’s because students graduate every year. There are a lot of different reasons why virtualizing the enterprise desktop is incredibly valuable to these companies. As usual, enterprise validation and certification take some time. I can’t give you a particular schedule, but I can tell you that the trials are going really well. Now, because of VMware, we can now engage 90% of the world’s virtualization opportunities, and the size of opportunities that we’re now looking at is getting larger and larger.

Next question?

Following up on the gaming question; the more than doubling in notebook gaming. Can you give us some context around that? That seems like a big growth rate. Is that a global phenomenon or is that kind of more regional and what do you think is driving that strength?

Thanks a lot, Joe. For the very first time in history, we’ve been able to get a GPU architecture that is able to do in a notebook form factor and achieve a level of performance that is on par with desktop PCs. This is a really big deal. In a thin notebook, the Maxwell GPU, because it’s two times the performance power factor compared to Kepler, which is already the most energy-efficient GPU we’ve ever built and the most energy-efficient GPU in the world today, we have lapped it by a factor of two. As a result, we’re able to bring to the notebook form factors a level of performance that’s on par with desktops. Now, gamers don’t have to choose. It’s really just a matter of what kind of platform you’re enjoying. We know that a lot of people like laptops. For gamers, until now, they’ve not been able to gain access to that level of performance without Maxwell. So this is a big deal for us, and we’re quite excited about the Maxwell ramp, and it's just beginning to ramp. My expectation is that we’re going to continue to grow the notebook gaming business for some time here.

And then also on the client GPU business, can you talk a little bit about pricing? It seems like your competitor hasn’t had the success you guys have had and it sounds like it’s being relatively price aggressive. They’ve talked about that. Can you just talk about the pricing environment, and does that competitive dynamic affect you guys at all?

Well, it’s really related to value, I think. Our strategy with GeForce has really moved away from a component pricing model over the past several years. It’s the reason why the value that is received by our gamers and appreciated by gamers continues to grow. We’ve really taken much more of a software-rich approach. Even though our GPU architecture is now far and away the best in the world, it’s the most energy-efficient, it's the highest performance, and it has amazing technology like VXGI that was just announced recently. Although at the foundational technology, it is far and away the best, if you look at the software environment — what we call the GFE, the GeForce Experience console that’s on top — we really think about the GeForce as a GeForce gaming PC platform now. The software intensity of it is quite high. If you have GeForce Experience, your ability to enjoy games at its fullest is really incomparable. I think that people don’t choose component A to component B anymore. Over time, we see a lot more return customers, and once you get on the GeForce platform, you tend to stay on the GeForce platform. Our goal is just to keep adding more and more value to the GeForce gamers that join the GeForce platform to earn their loyalty over time, and I think we're doing a really good job there. I'm really proud of the team for their work here, and the results kind of show it.

This is Shankar on behalf of Vivek. I have a question regarding the attach rates in the traditional PC market. Do you see the declining attach rates in traditional PC to become a drag at some point? And if so, what kind of impact do you expect to see?

PC OEMs represent about less than 25% of our GPU business and much less than 25% of our overall business already. And within that, there are some moving parts. PCs are becoming thinner and lighter in some cases, which tends to mean they do not have GPUs attached. Some cases, the PCs are becoming application-specific PCs, like gaming notebooks, in which case the GPU not only is attached but the GPU becomes quite powerful indeed. On the other hand, workstation notebooks are growing. There are also a lot of different moving parts, but I would say the mainstream commodity notebook PC has been seeing lower and lower GPU attach for quite a long time, and it’s not a surprise to us.

Got it. On the datacenter cloud market, the recent market adoption of HPC as a core processor with Intel Xeon processors, do you see that as a stumbling block towards growing your datacenter and cloud revenue?

Well, FPGAs have been around for 30 years and they've been used in all kinds of applications, far and wide in various areas. GPU-accelerated datacenters is really quite a new phenomenon. The benefit of a GPU-accelerated datacenter is that the amount of total computational resource you could bring to bear is really quite amazing. It’s not really practical or logical that one person or small team designing an FPGA could achieve the level of computational throughput that the NVIDIA R&D department with thousands of engineers—refining a singular architecture called CUDA over the years—could achieve. Secondarily, programming our GPUs using CUDA is far, far easier than programming an FPGA. The R&D cost is a lot lower, the rate of iteration is much higher. That’s one of the reasons why Tesla has yet another record quarter. The number of platforms that support Tesla is growing all over the world, and I think it’s a foregone conclusion that accelerated computing could add a lot of value in many areas of computing.

Looking into your revenue guidance for Q4, can you just tell us if your GeForce PC gaming segment is growing quarter-over-quarter and maybe that’s potentially been offset by your PC OEM business? Jen-Hsun, as you mentioned, we just had the big launch of Call of Duty Advanced Warfare. We've got the Assassin's Creed launch coming up soon. We've got several other blockbuster games in November. So I would assume that your PC gaming is up sequentially in January, but wanted to get your thoughts.

Yes, Harlan, I appreciate that. We're expecting our gaming platforms and our enterprise datacenter platforms to be up quarter-to-quarter. Those are benefiting from both industry adoption of our platforms, as well as the fact that we are going into a brand new product cycle with Maxwell. We're also expecting our OEM business to be down sequentially, but our guidance reflects all that.

And then as you mentioned continued strength in enterprise, we’ve got the microprocessor ramp going into datacenters and HPCs. It was about 10% of the mix for Intel in Q3. One of the first big adopters, like I said, tends to be HPC and datacenter. So, the question is how much of this is contributing to the strength in Tesla and potentially your GRID-based products, or is it more just sort of with Tesla and GRID, just prior design wins that are finally starting to ramp, or maybe a combination of both?

Well, Tesla and GRID are both delivering record numbers at the moment, and they're driven by the fact that the enterprise adoption of our platforms is increasing. But in the grand scheme of things, they are still a small percentage of the world’s overall servers. My sense is that those matters are important, but they’re not significant. Most of our adoptions tend to be related to new applications or an OEM certifying a new server for GRID. There's a whole bunch of servers being certified right now, or a cloud datacenter service provider who is able to deploy their service using machine learning service or a natural language processing service or a music tagging service, or some service that requires our GPUs deployed into production. Those tend to be the large reasons why we grow, more so than the microprocessor that is attached to.

This is Chris Hemmelgarn on Blayne. Congrats on a good quarter. First, I was curious, with Intel’s new Broadwell platform looking to launch late in the first half of next year, are you guys concerned about any more pronounced seasonality in Q1 ahead of that product launch, or would you expect kind of just general typical seasonal trends this year?

Our OEM business is just a smaller and smaller part of our overall business driver. Most of the platforms that we offer engage specific vertical markets, whether it’s gaming or high-performance computing or enterprise virtualization or the cloud services with service providers or the automotive industry. These verticals tend to be much more important in how we think about our business. We also see now that our OEMs or our OEM partners go into a new product cycle when we launch a new product. When there was a new Maxwell GPU recently, every notebook OEM in the world offered a brand new gaming notebook, irrespective of the rest of the platform. The reception of those notebooks has been fantastic. It’s been so successful for us in the notebook gaming business, that for the very first time, HP and Lenovo both joined our GeForce gaming platform and offered gaming notebooks under their own brands. We’re excited about the work that we’re doing here. We’re seeing more and more of this type of dynamic as we continue to transition our Company’s business model from a components business attached to other components to a platform model, where we engage vertical markets where we serve.

And I guess follow-up, just turning to automotive business, obviously going quite well for you. You’ve highlighted strength in infotainment this past quarter. It sounds like in December, the new Tesla launching is going to support some type of autonomous driving. You guys had mentioned that at your last Analyst Day, I believe that that was one big opportunity for Tegra. I was just curious as to where you thought we were hitting a point where that could be a meaningful driver? You talked about the auto business doubling in consecutive years. Do you see some of these new opportunities – I guess a continued path for growth beyond that? Just kind of interested in your general thoughts?

We came into the automotive industry because we think that the car is going to contain some of the powerful computers that we have, and the future of the car is going to have computing in not just infotainment, but the entire digital cockpit will be driven by computers. Because of better and better auto-piloted capabilities, the car will become quite rich in supercomputing capabilities over time. The car industry is quite a rich opportunity for our computing focus. Whether it's seeing around the car using visual computing technologies, or presenting information to the driver in all kinds of rich ways, whether it’s infotainment or your digital cockpit or heads-up display or other technologies in the future, visual computing is going to play a huge role in the future of cars. So we’re quite excited about the opportunities there.

Congratulations on very good results. Question on the GRID traction. In the past, you talked about some design engagements and some metrics around that. I was wondering if you could perhaps update us a little bit on the trajectory of GRID in the enterprise as they begin to realize the leverage of cloud-based visual computing.

We continue to track it. We’re over 1,000 trials around the world. We’re going to focus our energy because we now have OEM partners and virtualization platform partners like VMware and Citrix who all have sales forces that are out there selling the platform now. We’re going to focus our energy to continue to evangelize GRID and to help the top customers, the top and the large engagements adopt GRID in trial and perform their trial performance of GRID. We’re going to continue to track them, and the number of opportunities continues to grow. I just mentioned earlier, as we partnered with VMware to take vSphere around the world, the number of customers who have come out to ask to be early adopters and to be part of the trial program is quite exciting. We put up a web self-trial service on the cloud called Try GRID, and I encourage you all to try it. Thousands and thousands of companies have come out to try it. It stands to reason that enterprises around the world would like to virtualize their entire enterprise. It’s more secure, it’s more cost-effective, and allows for a mobile workforce, and in many industries quite a dynamic workforce. The workforce could ramp up and down pretty dramatically from season to season, and because they work with a lot of contractors, they could be onsite and off and change quite rapidly. GRID virtualizes all of their workstations and PCs and makes it a lot easier for enterprises to support their dynamic workforce. That’s why all of these OEMs are supportive of GRID and why they’re taking it to market.

And my follow-up question, on the fourth quarter revenue guidance, you had mentioned that the gaming platforms would be up sequentially and enterprise datacenter would be up sequentially. So that would imply that the Tegra business is down sequentially, in order to hit the numbers for the midpoint of the guidance. Just wondering if that's just normal seasonality that you’re seeing in Tegra for Q4 or if there's any other issues that are going on there? If you could elaborate on Tegra going into Q4, that would be helpful. Thank you.

Our strategy is to continue to advance our own platforms that are addressing these local markets. When I said the gaming platform was going to be up sequentially, I meant that our PC desktop, our PC notebook, and our SHIELD gaming platforms would all be up sequentially. They would each all be up sequentially. Our OEM business will be down sequentially, and part of it is PC OEMs and part of it is device OEMs.

Operator, do we have another question?

Jen-Hsun, I know earlier that you addressed the issue of Broadwell being a little slower to market. But I'm kind of curious from a process technology perspective. Does the trouble that Intel is having with 14 nanometer mean anything to you as you work to bring FinFET technology to market? Does it make you nervous about your own timelines, or does it make you more excited that you’re going to be in a position to maybe compete with a like-for-like transistor technology in the 2015 timeframe?

We have a variety of options available to us. I've been asked before about Moore's Law, and I support it. However, Moore's Law encompasses not just physics but also architectural advancements and innovation. Ultimately, it focuses on performance and innovative thinking. For instance, Maxwell has doubled the performance power factor compared to Kepler, which is quite significant and arguably unprecedented. This is considerably faster than what Moore's Law suggests. I expect continued progress in this area as we enhance value through architecture, design, processes, and the integration of these elements with software. All of these aspects are our tools for growth. We are looking forward to the next generation of FinFET technology. We've gained substantial experience as we've introduced new process technologies and have become increasingly proficient. This is largely due to our exceptional team in the advanced technology group, who collaborate closely with our foundry partners to develop test chips and rigorous testing and development methodologies that ensure we are ready for ramp-up when the processors are ready. I'm optimistic about the next few nodes because of the work we've accomplished.

Okay. And you touched on what I also wanted to talk about with Maxwell in the market right now. I'm wondering, can you give us an example or us an example, I should say, of some of the gaming titles or the evolution of the industry that’s starting to take advantage of Maxwell’s capabilities right now? And I'm wondering if the clear advantage Maxwell has in the market is leading into any progress on the licensing front? Thanks.

Every gamer who buys Maxwell will immediately benefit from Maxwell in literally every single game they play. They will enjoy it in one of three ways. If you are a desktop gamer and you’re playing one of the most advanced games out there, you’re going to benefit. It’s likely that you have a GTX 560, GTX 660, GTX 760, or GTX 670. There are 10 million gamers who have GPUs that are GeForce that are installed in their systems that can benefit from a Maxwell upgrade. When they install Maxwell, they’re going to get the benefit of that two-fold increase. They’re going to either get better visual quality at the same frame rate or a much higher frame rate at an even better and bigger quality. If you are a notebook gamer, Maxwell allows you to enjoy desktop-level performance for the very first time in your laptop. Even if you had a game, and this is what’s really cool about Maxwell — even if you have a game that’s already running at 60 frames per second on your 1080p monitor, the thing that’s really cool about Maxwell is that we can render effectively at a 4k resolution on our chip and display it at 1080p on your monitor. All of a sudden, your 1080p monitor improves in fidelity, as if you had a 4k monitor. There are many ways you can enjoy that. Our licensing discussions are very active. We have many in important stages. At the highest level, the way to think about why we add value to several players in the industry is that the mobile device market is really commoditizing. By adding NVIDIA GPU to their SoC, they can differentiate head and shoulders above the rest of the industry. Although there are many ways to differentiate, having the best processor in your mobile device is arguably the first way and the best way of doing it. Maxwell surely adds value in that process. Tegra K1 adds an enormous amount of value in helping to validate the importance of our GPU and mobile applications. All of that helps.

Operator, next question?

Congratulations, guys. A couple of questions there. On process node migrations, also to Alex's question, what’s the roadmap on the GPU side of the equation? Are you going to skip 20 nanometers and go straight to FinFET?

Hans, we haven’t announced our next-generation products yet. We have a lot of great surprises for you guys, and I'm excited about our next-generation GPU. Right now, we're enjoying ramping Maxwell. This is a brand new product cycle, and I don’t remember our product cycle in our Company’s history where we've had the lead we have, the richness of applications in the gaming industry that we're ramping into, nor the number of vertical markets that we now serve—from gaming to design to cloud to high-performance computing—that we now serve with this architecture. Maxwell is unquestionably at this point a home run, and we're just savoring the moment and ramping the living daylights out of it.

Okay, fair enough. And then as a follow-up, Jen-Hsun. The game console guys have had a good year with a new product cycle to them. How do you compare this cycle for them versus PC gaming and Android gaming for that matter?

I would say that the early adopters of the game console market will enjoy every single platform. I've got everyone. They’ll have the PC, they’ll have game consoles. But my sense is that the game console platform is not likely to enjoy the heyday when it was really unambiguously the only and the best game platform. There are just too many other ways to enjoy games. The PC has become the world’s largest game platform. China and developing countries around the world view PC as a gaming platform they already own. They can upgrade it two, three, or four times without having to change the basic platform. The total cost of ownership of a gaming PC is quite attractive. The games are incredible. PC gaming continues to expand with new titles. Great titles are coming to the PC and the quality of titles is growing rapidly. Mobile gaming will also grow. There are too many ways to enjoy games for the game console to enjoy the heyday of the past.

Jen-Hsun, one question on Tesla. Some of your peers who are participating in the HPC market are highlighting some increased visibility. I was just wondering if you could give us any color on your visibility into Tesla. It has proven to be a little bit lumpy in the past. I was just wondering what kind of visibility you are seeing in this environment today?

The number of applications that run on Tesla is growing, and that is not a lumpy factor; it’s continuing to grow. The number of customers of Tesla is growing. The number of industries that Tesla is servicing is growing. It's now conventional wisdom that the accelerated computing model we invented with Tesla is going to be a very important model for computing for the foreseeable future. When we go to Supercomputing this year, I think it will help us understand where accelerated computing fits in the psychology of computing around the world. I think it is past the tipping point, if not at it, that accelerated computing can play a significant role in the whole field of computing. There are some applications where accelerated computing shines. Of course, imaging is an area where accelerated computing does incredibly well. The number of applications related to understanding images and processing images—from satellites, from cameras, and from smartphones—all around the world, could create the killer app or one of the major killer apps that we’re looking at. This is a global phenomenon with all kinds of interesting applications. So, high-performance computing and accelerated computing are now synonymous, and I think the visibility we have confirms that we are on the right path.

And you earlier said that obviously Tesla is a very small percentage of overall compute in datacenter. In that sense, what is the kind of growth profile you have in mind? How do you see this business growing over the next two to three years?

Well, I think that someday all datacenters will be accelerated, and because we’re starting from a very small base, it explains why Tesla is one of our largest growth opportunities. For two consecutive quarters, we’ve now seen record quarters, and the number of partners that support Tesla is growing, and the depth of their support is increasing. I think Tesla will become a large business over time, and I would be very surprised if there are significant or large datacenters anywhere in the world that aren’t somehow accelerated by GPUs.

Thank you, operator. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. We look forward to talking to you next time on our Q4 earnings call.