NVIDIA Morgan Stanley Webcast: RSX-PS3, NV50-PC comments
- "So I think your RSX full production silicon is ready" - "Yeh."
- "Sony is manufacturing RSX in their own fabs, as well as Toshiba fabs"
- "Our focus now is on diesize reduction and bring up more fabs"
- In terms of our economic relationship with Sony, it has 3 parts:
--- NRA: "We are signed up to build the RSX for Sony, to port RSX to multiple fabs to increase the capacity."
- Had the think in terms of being able to build 30M units a year. Needed to potentially repeat the PS2 success.
- Tons of different fabs needed to reach that capacity, so it's a lot of work.
- For us, we're also signed up to do cost reduction to new processes.
-- Also working on making the RSX more prevelant at Sony. RSX+CELL = Digital Architecture for Sony.
- So they want to use that architecture in all kinds of things, among which HD Video-related.
- Look at PS2: Two huge chips back one, One small chip that's hardly costing anything now.
- So, have to "reimplement the RSX" within the next 10 years into all those kinds of digital devices.
- Considered to be a 50% Margins Business.
--- License Element of the PS3: Extra fixed licensing revenue every quarter for 3 years.
- Been recognizing that for a couple of quarters now.
- That applies to the PS3, but also the use of RSX Technology in "all of these other platforms".
--- Royalty Component, as they ship our technology in each of these platforms.
- That element of our business hasn't started yet.
- But lead time ahead of when you might see boxes in the market. [Uttar: Reminder: They said June/July for Royalties]
--- System is structured so that licensing revenue is likely to stop when royalty revenue peaks.
- "In the front of the life of the PS3, it's all NRA and it's all fixed license fees"
- "So that's why we're seeing the benefits of Sony and PS3 pretty substantially this year"
- "The PSP is really one the last 3D devices that will be built inhouse by anybody on the planet"
- "Nobody has invested beyond Texture Mapping [that is, besides the industry-only companies, thus Intel kinda]"
- "Not one vertically integrated company has invested in internal programmable shading architecture - ever."
- It was a huge discontinuity in investment, so from his pov, it doesn't make sense without volumes like theirs.
- "Our technology is pretty open market, and we're delighted to sell to anybody who wants to buy it".
- So it seems illogical to want to reinvent it.
- "Well we hope that... uhm... yeah, we would like that... uh.... we would be ecstatic to work on
future generation game consoles and, uhm, you know, whether it's be... uh... uhm... gameboy or PSP, the
volumes are just so enormous... and... hum... and it's always fun to have in your pocket something you built."
- "As you know, the foundries did a great job with 90 - and I think the reason for that is that 130 was so hard,
90 is, uhm, 90 is, uhm, I don't think it's easy but it seems like a wall in the park for them. So, we are
ramping up 90 pretty aggressively... Our 7900, the new high-end is 90, the 7600 which is the follow-up to our
really really successful 6600 is a 90... and, uhm, 7300 is a 90. We have integrated core logic going on in the 90
- "And very quickly we'll be doing a shrink in the 80 for cost improvement reasons, but basically it's the
same process. Most of our new desgins [unhearable] in the pipeline are 65 so, uhm, we are investing in
65 now and 55 very shortly after that."
- NV50-related...
- "Increasing flexibility of the programmability, enabling the artists to express themselves in a free way."
- "Our next generation product will just take [effects] to a brand new level"
- "Our next generation product is the combination of 3 years of heavy-duty work. We started architecting it about 4 years ago, and, you know, my best calculations have this investing $250M into it already, and by the time it launches as well as the entire product family, we will have invested about $500M in R&D."
- "It is a spectacular computing machine and, uhm, we can't wait to show it to you later this year".
- "And this year, along with Vista, is going to introduce a very important new API, it's called DX10"
- "And DX10 is just a giant leap forward in unifying the way people program graphics. Instead of, you know,"
"vertices, and shaders and textures, it's unified in a very elegant way. And it's unified in a way that
"makes it possible for us to abstract [GPU] programming to the next level."
- "Our DX10 [part] is nearly finished now, and uhm, it'll be rolled out this year sometime."
- "And, uhm, if I have my way, our next generation GPU will be the first DX10 GPU in the world."
