NVIDIA

X-Box

We met with NVIDIA's Rich Black and Derek Perez on Sunday. We tried to get Rich and Derek to comment on the NV15 and NV11, but Derek told us that he'll have a complete update ready for us in a few weeks. We do know for a fact that NVIDIA has NV15 silicon since a NV15 was powering the X-Box demo unit Bill Gates used in his keynote speech. The NV11

NVIDIA's Derek Perez

Earlier, we had cited a Reuters story that stated that the X-Box would use NVIDIA's NV25 chip. When we asked Rich Black about the NV25, he informed us that NVIDIA was actually making a custom made chip just for the X-Box.

We had crunched the numbers Microsoft provided on the X-Box the day before, and according to MS, the X-Box will have a 300MHz graphics chip and will be able to push out 4.8Gigapixels a second. That translates into sixteen pixels per clock cycle. We asked Rich if our 16-pixels/cycle number was correct, and if NVIDIA would be able to pull it off. Rich just grinned slightly, gave us a determined look and repeated what NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told his troops: "We will not fail."

Expansion

The X-Box is NVIDIA's first venture into the consumer electronics market, and a failure there will ruin plans for future expansion. Just talking with Rich and Derek, you get the feeling that NVIDIA has its own "Manifest Destiny." Rich told us that there were plenty of markets that were natural extensions for NVIDIA products. NVIDIA had already entered the workstation market with the Quadro. Future markets could include the mobile market and the Apple Mac platform. Don't be surprised if NVIDIA launches as many as six new products this fall.

The NVIDIA Booth

NVIDIA's core competency will always be 3D graphics, and you can bet that NVIDIA will keep pumping out new technology. Rich told me that NVIDIA currently has three or four separate engineering teams all working on 18 month cycles so that there will always be a new product ready every six months (they're forming a new group just for the X-Box).