Nvidia had an earnings call yesterday following their Q3 results, and in the Q&A Jen-Hsun Huang (Nvidia CEO) commented briefly about the Nintendo Switch, and I figured the comments were interesting enough to warrant a new thread. Here's what he said (taken from
SeekingAlpha's transcript):
A few notes:
- The question asked was about the increased revenues of Nvidia's gaming division, so when he says "Nintendo contributed a fair amount to that growth", that's what he's referring to. Gaming revenue was up by $463 million over the last quarter, although what constitutes "a fair amount" of that is anyone's guess. This could be R&D/consulting payments on completion of tape-out, or it could be an initial payment for the first batch of chips.
- The fact that Nvidia are including Nintendo's business in their Gaming division, rather than their IP licensing division, would indicate that Nvidia are handling manufacturing and selling the final chips to Nintendo, rather than Nintendo licensing the design and handling manufacturing themselves (which was their arrangement with AMD for Wii U's GPU).
- Working with Nintendo for "almost two years" means design work on Switch's SoC likely started at the end of 2014/start of 2015. That would seem like a pretty typical timescale for a custom chip like this.
- The "several hundred engineering years" re-states what was in Nvidia's initial press release (which afaik claimed 500 engineering man-years).
This last bit is speculation on my part, but when he says "over the next" and then cuts off to talk about Nintendo using the same architecture for a long time, I get the impression that Nvidia already has contracts for future Nintendo hardware that he's trying not to talk about. Claiming that the relationship will last "two decades" is also pretty confident even for Huang, and I have a feeling that this is further evidence that Switch is the start of the "family of systems" which Iwata talked about, all revolving around ARM/Nvidia SoCs and a common software platform.