Some Cool Statements from NVIDIA

by Anna Filatova
03/29/2002 | 10:50 PM

Mr. K.B.Ng, NVIDIA Asia-Pacific marketing director, said a few very interesting things in an interview to Digitimes. Here are some selected items for you:

• According to statistics, the year-on-year growth of the game console market is as high as 20%, much greater than the PC sector, so it is a very important business area for Nvidia. In the fourth quarter of 2001, Xbox chips had accounted for more than 10% of Nvidia’s total shipments. The ratio is expected to be higher in 2002 with the rising shipments of Xbox game consoles.
• Nvidia’s current share of the desktop graphics chip market has reached 70%.
• NVIDIA estimates that the launch of integrated chipsets is about to take away 10-20% sales of the entry-level graphics cards market. However, the company is not going to keep hands in pockets and prepares actively for the price-war.
• Nvidia’s notebook-use graphics chip has been able to take up 10% of the market in two quarters. Dell and Toshiba have adopted the chips now, and several more Japanese notebook manufacturers are expected to begin using the graphics chips in the near future.
• To the question about the reasons of small market share of the nForce core logic chipset (it is still below 10%), Mr. K.B.Ng answered very sincerely that the main reason in the AMD-platform market is because of the relatively higher price of the product. Of course, that is true! At first, NVIDIA was going to sell nForce420-D for $90 per chip (Intel could never even dream of something like that in the desktop market). Now NVIDIA seems to have finally learned what’s going on in that market and corrected the pricing accordingly.
• NVIDA hasn’t yet made up its mind about the second contract manufacturer (the first one is TSMC). Of course, since 0.13micron manufacturing technology, which NVIDIA needs is available only by TSMC so far, and UMC will be able to offer it only in summer. So, the guys are waiting...