CeBit 2003
Interview with Alan Tike (nVidia)
Q: nVidia has recently completed the financial year, what are your estimates of the totals?
A: Simply fantastic! If we look at the turnaround, we have grown from $1.4 mln to $1.9, i.e. a 45% growth. This figure is really good.
Q: Turnaround and revenues are different things. You completed the past year at a substantial gain in the incomes part, but was it attained due to settling the financial discords with Microsoft?
A: Well, not at all actually. Regarding the Xbox, all has been settled down, both parties have come to a compromise and we are all pleased with it.
Q: What are your chances of becoming a solutions provider for the XBox2?
A: Today, when making such key decisions large companies proceed from the term of two years... they are vital for launching projects of such a scale. It's business, and let's wait and see who will win eventually in view of three more years left until the release of XBox2 and a whole year for discussions and putting forward new suggestions :-)
Q: A curious analogy - your first graphics card based on the NV1 chip was an ignominious failure, the second chip - a matter of worship, TNT128 seriously moved 3DFX aside, and the third, GeForce took all the competition to town and even turned some down to dust. So what do we see now? The first nForce did not play a decent competition, but a year later there nForce2 was released which fully revealed potentials of the dual-channel memory and outperformed the close competitor, VIA KT400, at all the benchmarks. What's going to be next???
A: Then there will be nForce2 with support for FSB 400 Mhz for new processors. As soon as we get a say-so from AMD, we'll release a new version of drivers for this chipset. On the hardware level, all is in and works, now it's AMD's turn.
Alan TikeQ: When will the nForce3 appear and which new features will it offer?
A: Can't tell it now :-) That is, no comments. But it will be ...
Q: The nV30 chip was announced in the middle of November at Comdex Fall 2002, 4 months have passed since then, but no FX cards have so far appeared in stores. Why so?
A: We invested incredibly huge amounts of money into that completely new chip. Now a time for returning the investments is coming. Additionally to NV30 (FX5800) we presented FX5600 and FX5200 last week... You see, what really matters in this - it's the first time for the whole history of the company that we have presented a complete spectrum of cards for the new API (I mean DX9) during as many as 100 days after its release, both for the performance sector and for the mainstream.
Q: On the topology level, is the chip the same or different?
A: Different. FX5800 supports DDR2, FX5600 - the first DDR, with FX5200 being the cut-down version.
Q: What are the current production stores for these chips?
A: By the end of April it's going to be 1.5 mln finished chips - quite enough for the initial saturation of the market. Most of them are mainly FX5200 - such is the structure of demands.
Q: Where has the abbreviation MX gone? Won't it be there any longer?
A: Yes, the MX index won't be used any more. FX5200 is in fact the same MX, but what's the sense of convincing the consumer that this MX is another stuff? :-) It's an absolutely modern card with support for DX9 and at affordable price.
Q: A year and a half ago, at Comdex'2001 there was a presentation of the NV17M mobile chip dubbed as "Breakfast with nVidia". But like its predecessor the chip wouldn't work. The priority left with ATI Mobile. Haven't you abandoned attempts to win this market?
A: You are bit late :-) Today there was a presentation of the mobile versions 5600 and 5200... you can have a look and touch new notebooks that came into batch production. By the way, to date we own a 25% share of the mobile video chips market. And our plans for the year 2004 is 50%.
Q: The current size of the unified Detonator driver has exceeded 20 megabytes. Maybe it made sense diverting the driver into old and new starting with the FX?
A: Currently there are over 100 million users of our graphics produce,we have around 20-25 partners manufacturing video cards on our chips, and any modifications made to the policies of releasing the unified driver will seriously hard our partners, their costs and finally the end users.
Q: Do you mean Detonator will always be there?
A: Yes.
3DNews: Thank you for your interview, we are looking forward to seeing your novelties in the retail!
Crowds at the nVidia expo standAt the nVidia's stand, tens of product samples were demonstrated, but we'll dwell on them as we look deeper into the stands, the way we did with Asus, but you simply can't help passing by Leadtek's FX5800:
Just one more interesting exhibit for a photo collection. We have seen Intel's and AMD's wafers tens of times, but so far have not yet seen what the video chips are cut out from:
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