X-bit labs

More Details about NVIDIA and Sony Joint Developments: CES 2005 Interview (page 4)

Category: Editorial

by Anna Filatova

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

Anna (X-bit labs): Will NVIDIA’s primary focus still remain on the PC GPU development, or you see the opportunity for your company to shift more towards the digital home initiative and appropriate class of devices cooperating with Sony and other manufacturers on the development of solutions in this field?

David Roman: You know I don’t want to sound as if we were just waffling on this but we do tend to focus on all of these fields. Let me put it this way: we don’t see the PC decreasing in terms of importance. But in terms of the relative size of our business there will be more growth outside of the PC space simply because those devices are growing faster. We do see that happening. We do still see that PC is being absolutely crucial for all of this media integration and all these new things to become possible. In terms of volume more of our business will still come from the non-PC space.

In terms of development, a lot of these devices still look like PCs. From our standpoint we develop a graphics processor that works in an environment and is driven by system architecture whether the form-factor is out of a PC, a game console, or a PDA. To some degree it doesn’t matter that much from a development stand point. That obviously matters for business and integration, but from a development stand point it doesn’t matter that much. I would say that we haven’t really changed our prospective that the PC and the PC architecture is fundamental for our development. It’s just that we see many more applications for that outside.

Now, the wireless media processing side is different. Because what we are looking in the cell technology is based around different nature of the business: it is driven by power consumption, much more driven by media playback, and video, and 3D. And we may very soon see cell phones that even though physically are not like the PC, the architectural model is probably moving more to the PC thing in terms of the setting issues, in terms of the common infrastructure, less vertical integration. Physically it may look like a system-on-a-chip, the architecture is more like a PC architecture, an integrated device architecture.

Returning to your question, we do not see ourselves moving away from the PC side at all, but it’s true that PC business will be a smaller percentage of our total sales, although it will still be growing in absolute terms.

Anna (X-bit labs): Thank you very much, David, for your time. I am sure our readers will also appreciate all this interesting info you agreed to share with them today. :)