This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1551/nvidia-reality-redefined-new-gforce-and-nforce-technology-unveiled

Guest: Jen-Hsun Huang - Nvidia
Guest: Drew Henry - Nvidia
Guest: Ujesh Desai - Nvidia
Host: Dan

Dan
All right. Welcome to our celebration today. I'd like to thank the members of the press and analyst community that are here today. I'd like to thank all of our customers that came to celebrate with us today, and our partners, we've partners that came to help out, thank you to them. But most importantly 200 yards this way, we've had a land party that started, there are 300 gamers that have been for 24 hours, I'd like to give them a huge round of applause for coming. Hey guys, what you're about to see, this is all for you.

So, the event here is the biggest thing we've ever done, this tent is 200 yards long, if anybody needs a little exercise, three laps around the tent is a mile. So, this is the biggest thing we've ever done. Also, you'll notice, the good news is or the bad news is, we're in the jet path of the San Jose airport, which mean you're going to hear them. We have a volume now, but we can take care of that. The good news is, they're all going to see this event from the air, so that's good. I'd also like to thank the city of San Jose for hosting this for us, thanks to them as well, great city.

All right. So, we have a lot to talk about today, before without any further delay, I want to introduce our first guest, our Co-Founder, Chief Executive and President; Jen-Hsun Huang to talk about what this means to the industry and Nvidia.

Jen-Hsun Huang - Nvidia
Thank you. Welcome. I want to welcome all of you to very special day for us. I especially want to welcome all of the gamers in the audience, Dan set a perfect... Today is all about you guys, we built it for you guys, you guys absolutely rock.

Well, this has been an amazing day and it's going to be an amazing year, and I wanted to take a few moments to frame it for you. Nvidia is on a pace for a record year. Just in PC graphics alone we've already grown 11% in last three quarters. We're the number one in desktop GPUs, we're number one in notebook GPUs, we're number one performance GPUs, we're number on in multi GPUs with SLI, we're number one in workstations. For anybody whose lives, whether its real life or pretend life depends on great graphics, you have made us your choice, and I want to thank you, we're honored to be your choice. Thank you very much.

I think the reason why we're here, is because we're intensely passionate about graphics, we're intensely passionate about solving the world's most challenging visual computing challenges.

If you take a look at what's happening in our PC ecosystem, and you think our intense focus on graphics, and our intense passion for visual computing, you'll understand why it is, we're positioned the way we are. We want to be, and we want to continue to be the company that helps you solve your visual computing challenges, whether its games, design or science. Whether its consoles, PCs from the most powerful image generators, to one of those miniaturized mobile devices, we want to be your partner to solve those challenges. And so it goes without saying we ought to support any processor. We're now the sole standalone, dedicated GPU supplier in the world.

It puts us in a unique position to continue to innovate on any processor or end user's shoes. So, you choose the processor and we'll be there for you, that is our commitment. This can't be a better time to be passionately focused on graphics. 2007 is going to be a big year for GPUs. Vista will be the single most pervasive 3D application ever created. Over the course of the next ten years, we're going to see billions of PCs that is going to be fundamentally enabled with 3D graphics at this foundation, enabling all kinds of new applications, Blu-ray disk and High Definition. If you're going to buy a movie for your living room, you're going to be -- you are going to want to watch it on your PC. So, your PC and your notebooks are going to need to be able to process the 30+ times more video processing capability necessary to deliver that six times better resolution.

Microsoft's DirectX 10 is going to enable a whole new generation of games. It's all about content, and these three foundations are going to enable the next generation of content for us, amazing opportunity for GPUs. When we talk about solving these visual computing challenges on the largest devices to the smallest of devices, we want to bring it to every single display in the world. This week we announced the acquisition of PortalPlayer. PortalPlayer is the innovator of a new class of chips, a new category of chips called Application Processors; in fact you've seen their technology incorporated in some really amazing products in the world. I happened to believe that two critical technologies for next generation mobile devices are the result of Application Processors and GPUs. With this combination Nvidia is uniquely positioned to be able to bring those amazing devices to reality. Over the course of the next ten years, I fully expect these mobile devices to become our most personal of computers. We really hope that with this combination we're going to create technologies that will enable the second PC revolution.

I am intensely excited about this opportunity, and I can't wait to build some wonderful products with the PortalPlayer team. I want to welcome all of the PortalPlayer employees to Nvidia.

So, an amazing year so far, an amazing week, and today is an amazing day. For the last four years, we have been in development in total secrecy, four years in secrecy. Now, some of my guys were telling me its actually 3.999 years in secrecy, because apparently the last 24 hours the world could not contain its enthusiasm, and people are starting to talk about G80s. G80, is the code name of our revolutionary new architecture, the first ground up architecture we've done since GeForce 256, the first GeForce. C55, is the core logic that it's the chasy of this high performance car if you will. It's the nervous system of the motherboard, and it's what enables G80 to transfer its power into the ultimate user experience. Well over a thousand man years, now a thousand Nvidia man years, is probably something like 2000 normal years. Well over a thousand people years and over $400 million in R&D, in order to build the best game machine for you guys.

Now, just a little bit of perspective on the importance of G80, you're going to learn all about it. The G80 is a major leap forward in a revolution we call the Programmable GPU. It fundamentally drives towards two vectors, making graphics more programmable, so that artists and designers have an infinite palate to create the best possible experience. And the second is to invent a new computing model, which unleashes the massive programmable and computational horsepower of the GPU, to leverage those resources for data intensive applications, they're frankly weren't practical except on super computers and custom ships until now. We call this new computing model GPU Computing. Those two fundamental investments, has really propelled our vision and today you're going to see the next major lead towards that.

Now, I am going to end it here, but with one very, very important final thing I want to say, the thousands of man years came from hundreds of engineers at Nvidia, who are watching us right now over a webcast. It is their blood, sweat and tears, their dedication, innovation and their passion to build these wonderful products for us. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in recognizing and thanking all of those engineers on the other side of that Internet for this incredible product they built.

Dan
Thank you again for joining us, have a great time and now let the show begin.

Speaker
How about a hand for my boss, a hand for my boss. Thank you Jason. All right. You know what I owe a few people here an apology I forgot to recognize one of most important groups here sitting in these front three rows here, are a select set of people. These are members of Club SLI, guys standup. These are the hardest of hardcore gamers right here, these guys have rigs that probably average in just in graphics alone a 1000, 1500 bucks, these guys are the hardcore. Thank you, guys for coming.

All right. So, I said earlier we are going to transform Harry, we are going to equip him for this new title wave of technology and we are going equip him with two new products today. I am excited to introduce the GeForce 8800 and the NForce 680. Now, this technology is going to transform him and we're physically going to do that. So, I am going to ask the Nvidia green suit guys and Nvidia crew to come in and take here your way. My boys take them away, take one last look at them, because you'll never see them like that again. B-bye.

All right now so Harry is off to be worked on, he needs a heart, he needs a new heart and I'd like to introduce the General Manager of our MCP Division, Drew Henry, the all American water polo player swam Alcatraz to San Francisco twice, loving founder of (Inaudible) Drew Henry.

Drew Henry - Nvidia
Thank you very much Dan and thank you all very much for coming I do want to tell you, San Francisco bay is cold. It is really cold and I did it without a wet suit. So, thank you very much, thank you very much for coming. This is a fantastic day and obviously really excited about talking about the brand new products that we want introduce into the marketplace today. Our NForce products, our NForce business is, now the second largest business within Nvidia. It's a business we have been investing in for last five years and growing it year over year over year, it's the second largest business now. Now, if you are not familiar what NForce is, when you pop open your PC and look inside when you peer through all those cables and stuff that big motherboard that's inside there, that's what NForce is. NForce is the main chips that go on that, on that motherboard and that is as Dan said the heart, what view as the heart of PC.

Now, today all over the world people are using our NForce products in servers, workstations, desktops, notebooks. It's represented by and sold by the top PC and computing manufacturing companies of the world and we're very, very proud to be the heart of all these different types of devices. And I am also excited to share with you today that DELL announced the availability of the first NForce based product for their new Optiplex line of commercial PCs that are brought by and used by the top commercial, top largest corporations in the world, this is a big, big, big thing for us. This is our AMD products that now use NForce and it's an exciting announcement for us to share that with you. But today I am not here to talk about the business PCs. Today I am here to talk about performance PCs. PCs that are designed for you guys, PCs that are designed for people that were here over the last 24 years for doing our GeForce LAN event, these are the products that are designed for what we view as the most demanding of our customers. These are customers -- you guys are customers that want the best performance, they want the best experiences, they want everything they push really hard on us. And our goal is to bring outstanding products for you.

So, today I am very pleased to announce our new NForce 680a and 680i products that are designed for performance motherboards for both AMD and for Intel. You can figure it out, it's very clever naming 680a, its AMD, 680i is for Intel. These motherboards, we view these motherboards now as without question the most powerful performance enthusiast (ph) motherboards are available in the marketplace. And I want specifically talk about this one, this is NForce 680i, this is first time that Nvidia has ever designed on our own completely designed and manufactured a complete motherboard solutions that has our NForce chips on it. So, this product will be a product that will be sold by our partners, number of our partners around the world, but this motherboard you can trust to deliver the absolute best Nvidia NForce experience.

Now, when we design a product like this, we think about generally four really, really important things. We are worry about what's absolute best performance that a product can have. We want to provide the absolute best gaming. We also want to provide an incredible amount of storage and an incredible online experience, when someone is working on their PC and you're gaming, you're online you want to have the best experience. These are the attributes that we built into this product. Best performance, absolute fastest gaming, incredible amounts of storage and advanced networking.

To understand how advanced this is, when Dan was taking about Harry, Harry has a standard networking connection built into it. Into our new NForce 600 family -- 680 family, we have built two Internet connections. And matter of fact those two Internet connections run 10 times faster than what Harry is capable of running at. So, this is actually 20 times faster networking performance that means that you can transfer from your living room, to your family room, between PCs within your house an entire 30 minute television show in one second.

So, these people that really appreciate this stuff. We also not only networking but storage is important, Harry 80 Gigabyte hard disk drive, what turns out with High-Definition movies, High-Definition with this whole move towards high definition, you would be very hard for us to be able to store one single High-Definition movie on Harry, because High-Definition movies are really, really large in size. So, we built this product with the ability to have up to 8 terabytes of hard disk drive storage. You can store 500 High-Definition movies on one of these products. You guys are awesome. I want to have that for the everyone of our launch events. Networking, storage the next things of course, is provide the best video, the best graphics experience, Nvidia SLI. This product can have up to four Nvidia GPUs and four graphics cards inside your PC.

And finally performance, there is great new class of products has come out in the marketplace now from AMD and from Intel. This new quad-core class of CPUs and what we have designed this product to do, is we designed this product to give you the absolute best experience, best amount of performance out of those CPUs who were very close with both companies to do that, but it turns out for these performance oriented customers of ours. They just buying a CPU and getting the performance that just from that CPU is not enough from them, turns out that in most CPUs there is extra performance that's built into it. And to get that extra performance, you want to overclock, so this product is designed to absolutely give you the most overclockable experience in the marketplace, which with some CPU's you can buy, can truly double, your CPU speed from the CPU that you buy off the market, this guy wants one, can we take orders right now. You can double your CPU. So, overclocking this thing that you do where you take your take your PC and actually run it at a higher rates than you would normally buy it at. And to really, really overclock a PC, you want to make it as absolutely cold as possible. You want to chill it down to as lowest temperature as possible and there is a whole class of extreme overclockers that, that are passionate about this. And we actually work with them to figure out, what kind of products that we can offer to them, to give them the best extreme overclocking experience. Perhaps, the best news of all; is that these products now our new 680 Family is available today. You can go on to E-tail sites around the world and buy these products today. And I can tell you already many people have already started posting them and these things are flying off the shelf right now.

So, what we need to do now, we need to bring Nvidia green suit guys backup and take NForce 680 and put NForce 680 inside of Harry. All right, thank you for helping guys.

All right, I want to thank you all very much, very much for coming. This is the fantastic day. Thank you for sharing it with us. Dan.

Dan
Drew Henry is crazy. How does he do it, he's crazy. All right. So now, Harry has a heart. He's part way on his way to being the ultimate PC for the Tidal Wave of 2007. What he needs now is a soul. So I'd like to introduce to you our Godfather of soul accomplish drummer, Metallica fan and loving father of two Ujesh Desai General Manager of the GPU business.

Ujesh Desai - Nvidia
Thanks Dan. So, I just want to start by telling Drew for a second, we have a community pool and its heated and I swim in it every weekend. So, thanks everyone for coming. My name is Ujesh Desai, I'm the General Manager of our GeForce GPU at Nvidia. I think, I have probably one of the world's best jobs here. I get to help, built all the cards that you guys get to use and put in your PC everyday. So, I love my job. So, I going to start first by talking about this Tidal Wave that Dan talked about. A Tidal Wave is coming, we've already covered it. Vista is coming, Hi-Def is coming to the PC and you're going to have Microsoft DirectX 10, a brand new operating system from Microsoft that's going to completely revolutionized the way you play games on your PC. You'll be able to create lush, rich environments that previously weren't possible in earlier versions of DirectX 9 and I'll talk about that and we'll show some demos on that today. But first I thought, why don't we jump right in and take a look at the product, okay, that we are announcing today. So, this is the GeForce 8800 GPU, got a close up of that, for everyone to see in the back.

This is the most complex GPU what we call Graphics Processing Unit; we'd ever built, in the history of the company. It has 681 million transistors. So, to put that in context for you, that's 30 times the number of transistors we had in original GeForce that we developed. So, an amazing amount of power that we put in here and you're going to need that to run all those three applications I talked about, Vista, Hi-Def, DX 10, we're going to use these to actually retrofit Harry. So we're delivering today with the GeForce 8800, is the world's first unified architecture DirectX 10 GPU that's just going to completely revolutionized gaming and I'll show how over next couple of minutes when we talk.

So, I thought probably the best way to do it, is actually go back in time and show you how graphics have been done over the last 20 years. I'm going to be get a little bit touchy for a couple of minutes, but not too techy. So, this is the traditional graphics pipeline and how we've done graphics for years now. As I talked about graphics on the PC consist of triangles and pixels. You're creating the triangles, lighting the pixels and drawing them on your screen. And this is the way we've done it for years, that a Vertex Shaders setup your triangle, Pixel Shader process it, draw it to your screen. And this works and the way we scale performance, if you remember, when I've talked in years past, as we just added the number of Vertex Shader units we had or the Pixel Shader units we had and that's the way we scaled our performance. But times are changing and that traditional way of doing it, is not going to work and I'll show you why with some two examples that we have here.

So, this first example is what we call a Vertex Bound Application. All that means is that there is a ton of triangles that we're drawing on the screen here. If you actually look at it in wireframe, the triangles that we're drawing to create the object, the shape of the object here are a lot. In my simplified GPU diagram that I have here, our GPU only has four Vertex Shader units. The color of this picture that you see here, as defined by the Pixels shader unit that you see here, is very easy. It's just the couple of different shades of green and browns, so very easy to do. It's the triangle of the vertex processing in this first application that's very difficult. So, in our simplified GPU here, we're actually bottlenecked by the number of Vertex Shader units we have, so our performance is basically only for, very simplified way of looking at it.

In our second example here, we call a Pixel Shader Bound Application. So, our pixel shader bound application if I could actually go into wireframe, I don't have a wireframe image here, but you would see that there's not that many triangles being used to draw the scene. What gives this scene, its complexity and its realistic look and feel, is actually the Pixel Shaders. We're using the Pixel Shaders to color and light and give it this nice realistic water look and feel. The problem here is, we're bottlenecked by the number of Pixel Shaders units we have in our PC and don't forget you guys out here in the audience, you've paid for that chip. So, the things that are sitting idle you've still paid for those idle transistors, you are not getting the most for your money. So, let's look at these same two examples on the unified architecture at the GeForce 8800.

The GeForce 8800 can dynamically allocate the processing power for whatever you want to do. So, in the first example you can devote most of them to doing your vertex processing and you just have one that's doing the actual coloring of the pixels. So, in this case your vertex processing workload is 11. In the bottom example, same thing, but now we can dynamically allocate it through the pixel shading processing. And all of this is done right in the hardware, it's built into the hardware and it's done through our drivers. It just does it automatically for you. The goal of this is just ultimate PC performance and maximizing your GPU utilization. It's more than just graphics, right that your PC is being asked to do, Dan already talked about poor old Harry and what he's going to be asked to do.

Well the other area that we focused on for the GeForce 8800 was video. As Dan mentioned we're going through a once in a decade transition going from DVD to HD-DVD. And it's going to put a tremendous burden on your PC to put that in the context. It's going to require four times the bit rate. You are going from 10 megabits per second to 40 megabits per second. You are drawing six times the number of pixels on your screen, going from 480P to 1080P. And it's about 10X the complexity, right. Going from MPEG-2, which you use on DVDs to H.264, which you use for Hi-Def. Now, if that wasn't enough, there is multiple encoding standards, multiple formats there's different software companies that provide that player applications. Hollywood wants you to protect the content, so you have to deal with content protection and all of this has to processed by poor old Harry, right. So, what we've done with the GeForce 8800 as we have put dedicated video engine into our GPU. We call it our PureVideo HD engine. So, we keep the 3D part on the 3D portion of the chip, the video part we've dedicated units right in our GPU that handle video and that's PureVideo HD. And what it delivers, is the ultimate Hi-Def experience on your PC.

So, let's talk about Microsoft DirectX 10. So, DirectX 10 as I mention is this brand new programming interface from Microsoft that game developers can use. Completely changed the way you're going to develop your games. You're going to have lush rich environments with tons of stuff. I already showed you geometry shaders in the cascades demo. Some of the other things they've added as things like geometry instancing, stream out, just features that previously weren't available in earlier versions of DirectX 10, are going to change the way you game. A hot topic in the gaming industry right now is, what we call Gameplay Physics.

So, doing things like fire, smoke and explosions and doing it effectively. Today the way this is done and in most games, as you pre-render the smoke as an animation and you play it back. And if you guys have interacted with that, the minute you run through this smoke, you can see that it's just a generated animation that kind of breaks down. So, on the GPU here, what we can do with GeForce 8800; we can now do all of the simulation of the smoke effects right on our GPU. Okay. So, you've seen some of the features of the GeForce 8800, I've talked about Microsoft DirectX 10, I've have talked about Vista, I've talked about Hi-Definition video, and I know what you guys were asking. What is the performance of this thing, right? Tell us, give us the meat. All right, well this is the performance of the GeForce 8800.

So, this is relative to the pervious generation high-end GPU, single GPU from Nvidia, which is our 7900 GTX these are some of the top games that are super graphics -- scene the intensive right now. Oblivion, Half-life 2, F.E.A.R., Doom 3, Company Heroes, if you look at this it's on average over 2x the performance, of the previous generation. So, phenomenal performance that we're delivering here.

So, I know you are waiting, okay what's that other number you Ujesh, right. The number we saw earlier, Vince was talking 3DMark06, we all know it. Did you guys set the new world record? Okay, well previously the world record, just you guys know, to give you a history lesson was 16,357 this is 3DMark06. This was achieved by taking 27900 GTXs over clocking them in SOI and running them to get that number. The new number is 17,361. So, I am happy to say we've broken the 3DMark06 record, but you're probably saying, "Well your last slide said 2x that is almost like 2x to me. That was done by a single GeForce 8800.

Now, don't forget we also support SOI. So, Vince is working on SOI right now, I can hardly wait so he gets his SOI numbers, but it's just going to be phenomenal. So, all the products we support; continue to support SOI. So, speaking of the products there is models. The first is the GeForce 8800 GTX. It will retail between 599 and 649. The second is the GeForce 8800 GTS and that will retail between 449 and 499. Now, the one thing I am happy to announce is keeping with Nvidia's tradition, both of these products are available today, hard launch.

And these are some of our great partners that we work with that are going to delivering both of these products okay. You guys have seen the GeForce 8800 GTX, the GTS you've seen all the performance, all the features what do you guys think?

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