Nvidia Post Great Q3 Fiscal Results and Reveal Licensing Plans

Nvidia has posted some very impressive Q3 fiscal year 2015 results. The GPU manufacturer had a revenue of £1.23 billion during that period, an impressive increase by 16% year-over-year. The overall revenues are at £3.43 billion and that is 15% over last year.

The new generation of graphics cards with the second generation of Maxwell GPUS is undoubtedly the reason for these great results. The two new cards, the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980, didn’t just take the reviewers by storm but overclockers and consumers alike. The refined 28nm architecture displayed increased performance at a significant lower power consumption. This is well reflected in the results posted as GPU sales were up by 13% over the previous year. Notebook sales also took off and they actually doubled over the same period last year.

Nvidia’s mobile Tegra chip also did very well with a 51% increase over the same time period last year. This is most likely fueled by Tegra-in-vehicles being a both a big success and market for Nvidia.

During the earnings call, Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang indicated that the company was actively discussing licensing its GPU technology in the mobile space. There wasn’t any specific companies or partners mentioned, but Huang did their “licensing discussions are very active. And we have many in important stages.”

So far, Nvidia is the only one manufacturing their Intellectual Property (IP), unlike ARM for example. They are just the opposite by designing the components, but not building any of them and instead rely on third party manufacturers to build actual products. Now it looks like Nvidia could look to increase their revenue even further by allowing other companies to incorporate their IP into other products, in the same way as ARM does.

Nvidia already has their own mobile Tegra K1 processors that have been shipping since this summer while the next generation is expected to the of 2015. With this in mind, it will be interesting to see how Nvidia will be handling the licensing in relation to their own products, keeping the cost reasonable without damaging their own brand; a fine balance.

Thanks to Tweaktown and BrightSideOfNews for providing us with this information

Image courtesy of Tweaktown