X-bit labs

More Details about NVIDIA and Sony Joint Developments: CES 2005 Interview

Category: Editorial

by Anna Filatova

[ 01/17/2005 | 04:36 PM ]

We would like to offer you an interview with NVIDIA’s Vice President of Corporate Marketing, David Roman, who kindly agreed to answer a few questions about the cooperation with Sony and about the situation with Playstation 3 related projects.

Table of contents:

During CES 2005 in Las Vegas I managed to get hold of David Roman, who is in charge of NVIDIA's Corporate marketing. In X-bit’s newswire we had quite a few posts lately about the Playstation 3 and NVIDIA’s contribution to the development of this new platform. And people have been talking a lot about it in the forums and all over the web. It looks like Playstation fans have become very aggressive and active lately: people want to know more about what’s happening. Therefore it was a great opportunity for me to ask a few questions about this extremely exciting and interesting topic.

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Anna (X-bit labs): Thank you very much, David, for taking the time to answer some of my questions. I know there are many things that you cannot actually talk about, but nevertheless, I am sure there is a lot of interesting news from the development stage you could share with our readers.

David Roman: Well, yes, there is not much that we can say unfortunately. However, I could tell you what the story is and then you could probably ask me some questions.

We worked closely with the Sony PR team on the launch and now they are here as well also so we are just chatting about it. Basically on December the 7^th we announced that we are collaborating on this next generation computer entertainment system. They don’t call it Playstation 3, but let’s assume that’s what it is. And basically what it is, it’s on next generation of GPU. As you know we don’t talk about next generation products but it’s our next generation of GPU. And we’ve been working with them to produce a customized version that is customized specifically to connect that to the cell processor, so that they could work together. And the timing and everything is up to them to disclose, although we will have some products a little bit later this year, so this is not that far in the future on the development side.

We’ve been working with them on the whole development platform for the software developers, which is one of the advantages to them with going outside, not doing it inside just in terms of the availability of tools, the availability of systems and things. What we developed was to come up with content and quickly and efficiently. In fact we engaged with them quite some time ago, so we‘ve been working with them for quite some time on the development platform overall for the new technology. The thing that we like about this partnership is not only the fact is that it’s Sony and it’s big and there is strong volume involved. But also the fact that Sony is very ambitious for where it wants this new computer entertainment system to go, so in terms of not just the 3D graphics but also in terms of the media processing, in terms of integration of different media types, and in terms of the role it going to play especially relative to what they see happening with the cell processor. The cell processor will be in lots of different devices, based around the palm and cellular tied together. So it’s a pretty ambitious thing that we are doing with 3D graphics technology. And we are thrilled to be cooperating on the graphics side.

There is not much we can say about the actual technology itself. First, because we don’t talk about our new technologies. We will be rolling a new graphics solution out as a GPU in addition to what we are doing with Sony.

With Sony, it’s a licensing deal. Sony will actually be manufacturing the chip themselves.