Q&A with Nvidia general manager of MCP business Drew Henry
With numerous negative rumors surrounding the discrete graphics card market regarding Nvidia's new GeForce 480/470 (Fermi) graphics chip, and facing competition from AMD, Digitimes recently had chance to talk to Drew Henry, Nvidia general manager of MCP business regarding the company's comment about these rumors as well as its strategy for the future.
Q: What are your comments on the rumors that Nvidia has blocked some graphics cores with problems on their GeForce 480/470 chips causing these chips to have less than 512 cores due to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC's) low yields?
A: Nvidia does not comment on unannounced products; however, we have a chance to launch a graphics chip with 512 cores in the future.
TSMC's yields for its 40nm process has met our expectations and market rumors about the yields being lower than 20% are completely untrue. We currently have everything under control.
Q: Can you tell us about Nvidia's plans for improving the GeForce GTX 480/470's power consumption and heat, and your schedule for the rest of the GTX 400 series?
A: Our new Fermi-based GeForce GTX 480/470 chips are a significant improvement over performance compared to our previous-generation GTX 285 despite that the GTX 480/470's power consumption is about 15-20W higher. However, we believe consumers that choose to purchase GTX 480/470 are more focused on performance instead of how much extra watts they consume. To pay a little higher electricity bill in exchange for 10% more in performance, I believe consumers will think this is a worthwhile trade.
GeForce GTX 480/470-based graphics cards have already been shipping from most of the major graphics card makers in April and the rest of the GeForce 400 series graphics cards will gradually be launched in the next few months to satisfy different markets.
Q: In the past year, due to demand for Nvidia products seeing a drop, Nvidia's close graphic card partner XFX has turned to also sell AMD graphics cards. Does Nvidia have any plans to strengthen the partnership with graphics card players?
A: I need to make two clarifications, one is that Nvidia's share of the graphics card market in the past six months has seen steady growth and did not drop.
Another one is that XFX is not a close partner of Nvidia and the company has a lot of partners such as Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International (MSI), Gigabyte Technology and Zotac that we are currently working closely with.
Q: With the price of graphics card components such as DRAM rising, does Nvidia have plans to raise its product prices?
A: We currently do not have plans to increase prices.
Q: How is Nvidia's performance in China?
A: Compared to other countries, China's desktop PC market is currently still seeing strong growth and since the country's DIY PC and gaming markets are also seeing growing demand, we have been seeing discrete graphics card sales in China rising.
We currently have a large amount of share in China's discrete graphics card market and believe the country will become the key driver for future revenues growth.
