by Anton Shilov
12/23/2002 | 06:03 AM
The CEO of NVIDIA Corporation shared some of the company’s plans on a press-conference in Taiwan, as local news-sources report. Mr. Jen-hsun Huang told the journalists and observers that the company expects the rebound of the consumer graphics card market next year. He also added that his company will now be very aggressive in adopting the more advanced manufacturing technologies, even despite of the fact that this can lengthen the interval between the new products.
The head of the most influential graphics processor developer on the planet said that they are fully satisfied with their partnership with TSMC. The Santa Clara, California-based company will continue to adopt thinner fabrication processes of their Taiwanese partners as soon as they are available. Currently TSMC seeks for customers on their 90 nanometer manufacturing lines and NVIDIA said that they will look towards it. Unfortunately, they did not clarified whether they plan to launch the next-generation NV35 VPU using this process, or adopt it only for the even more progressive NV40 VPU. At the moment is seems to be more logical to wait for the NV40 to adopt the new technology since currently it is not mature enough.<%BANNER[article]%>
According to the statement, 50% of all NVIDIA products will be made using 0.13 micron fabrication process by the end of 2003.
Given that next year a lot of new and interesting personal computer games will come, including the highly-anticipated Doom III and Unreal 2003 titles, NVIDIA expects that consumers will upgrade their existing graphics platforms with something new. Next year the company will offer us the NV31 and the NV34 solutions for performance and mainsteam markets respectively. The former will come in the first half of 2003, probably in Spring, while the latter is due a bit later. Both VPUs will support the same graphics features as the GeForce FX VPU. In the second half of the year NVIDIA will launch their even more powerful and feature-rich GeForce FX derivative currently code-named NV35.