BofA Securities analyst Vivek Arya raised the price target on NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) to $650.00 (from $600.00) noting 4 key takeaways from the Ampere gaming event:

1) mainstream RTX 3080 and 3070 cards (which per NVDA have largest inter-generational performance boost, 2x+ vs Turing and Pascal) are priced at $699 and $499, unchanged from
prior-gen Turing versions, and are $100 cheaper than the speculated $799/$599 pricing ahead of the event.

2) high-end 3090 card is priced at $1,499, 25% higher than the 2080 Ti it replaces.

3) Ampere is likely to add a performance boost (4K at 60 frames/sec) both for traditional AND ray traced games even on traditional games that Turing often compromised on, leading some Pascal gamers to forgo the Turing upgrade.

4) cards will be manufactured on Samsung 8nm process instead of NVDA’s main foundry TSMC (foundry diversification eliminates capacity as a bottleneck) and its 7nm process which is likely still being used for the data center Ampere products.

The analyst maintained a Buy rating, seeing the potential for Ampere 30x gaming cards to drive a solid replacement cycle for the ~75% of NVDA deployed base that’s on Pascal or prior cards and drive upside to very conservative CY21/22E YoY gaming consensus.