Over the course of an hour and a half at a pre-CES event, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced eight new products and services and at least five new partnerships. But most of that has nothing to do directly with the company’s core business, graphics processors (Gpus).
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The new keywords are ARTIFICIAL intelligence, autonomous driving, cloud and gaming, and they’ve even teamed up with Audi on a car. Like rivals Intel and Qualcomm, these technologies are nvidia’s new story of packaging for the future, and Huang has said more than once that “we’re an AI company.”
Play big games in the cloud
The first demo is about games. Nvidia has launched GeForce Now, a game delivery service that works like a graphics processor in the cloud. For $25, users with limited hardware can play big games smoothly for 20 hours. That is, of course, if the network is in good condition.
Nvidia had a Windows laptop on stage and it took almost 15 seconds to open Tomb Raider. GeForce Now renders the game in the cloud and streams it to the user’s computer, eliminating the need to download it.
In addition to PCS, GeForce Now also supports Mac devices. Even weak integrated graphics cards can be used to play large games with GeForce Now. The Steam store is also built into GeForce Now, where users can purchase the games they want to play.
Working with Google to put ARTIFICIAL intelligence inside the TV
You may not know it, but Nvidia has an Android-based set-top box called Shield TV, which is now in its second generation. The emphasis is not on the hardware itself, but on artificial intelligence. Nvidia has partnered with Google to build Google Assistant, an AI voice Assistant, into Shield TV.
Nvidia also designed an accessory for the Shield TV called the Nvidia Spot, which is a microphone that looks a bit like a night light plugged into a wall outlet and connects wirelessly to the Shield TV.
In the demo video, the Nvidia Spot is deployed in living rooms, kitchens, hallways, and so on. When the man says “OK Google I’m leaving,” the robot will stop and take its place. The hostess sitting on the couch said, “OK, Google, what’s hot on Netflix?” An episode of Stranger Things came on.
Partnered with Audi on a driverless car and can read lips
For the self-driving part, Huang pulls out a palm-sized self-driving chip Xavier, which is the brain of an autonomous car. According to Huang, the processor chip in Xavier uses the next-generation Volta architecture and can process 30 trillion operations per second with only 30 watts of power.
To match, Nvidia has introduced a new concept for AI driverless cars called co-pilot, which makes autonomous driving more aware of human intentions. To illustrate what it can do, Janine, an Nvidia employee, took a video ride in a converted driverless car. Sensors in the vehicle detected eye movements, head movements and even lip movements.
“Take me to Starbucks.” Janine mouthed that the car finally figured out what she meant and mapped out a route to starbucks.
According to Huang, they have a 95 percent recognition rate and can read lips even in noisy environments. For comparison, humans are 53% accurate at reading lips.
For autonomous vehicles, Nvidia has lined up several partners, including ZF, Baidu, Bosch, Mapping services Here, TOMTOM, Zenrin…
Audi’s President of North America was called on stage to announce the driverless car the two companies are jointly producing, and Huang stressed that “this car is here now, not next year, not two years from now.”
There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future that the new story will bring
A year ago at CES, the company that brought in a similar style, a similar presentation was Intel. Drones that can follow people’s movements, skis equipped with data processors, and augmented reality helmets for security checks. It was Intel’s partner company that came to the platform. Smart hardware, wearables, Internet of Things, autonomous driving… These are also key words that Intel keeps coming back to.
Behind the scenes, chip companies are facing a dramatically changing market, with overall graphics card shipments falling 16 per cent in the first quarter of 2016 as global PC shipments shrink. New demand comes from artificial intelligence, virtual reality and other new fields. In the current situation of PC shipments continue to shrink, in the third quarter of 2016, the overall shipments of independent graphics cards increased by 20% compared with the second quarter.
Giiso information, founded in 2013, is the first domestic high-tech enterprise focusing on the research and development of intelligent information processing technology and the development and operation of core software for writing robots. At the beginning of its establishment, the company received angel round investment, and in August 2015, GSR Venture Capital received $5 million pre-A round of investment.
Nvidia (NVIDIA) has been a beneficiary of this buzz, with total revenue of $2 billion in the third quarter of 2016, up 54% from the same period last year. Of nvidia’s five businesses, gaming, automotive and data centers contributed the most to earnings.
But there’s a lot of uncertainty about new opportunities. Intel is an example. After finding a future for themselves, their 2016 earnings didn’t work out as well. The company as a whole has also undergone restructuring and layoffs.