So how long do you think the PC will remain as your primary business model?

The way to think about the PC is really our only model for deployment of GPU technology and products. The game consoles will always be a closed system and so we see that as a primary model for IP. With Cell Phones we're going to see models from both - IP and stand alone products. Each industry has its own way of working and in the broadest way of thinking about it we fundamentally invest in the technology and we will monetise that investment in a lot of different ways, whether its entire boards or subsystems for workstation, or IP for cell phones and game consoles.

Presumably the model for cell phones will be the trickle down effect, i.e. the low end, possibly a number of architectures prior to what currently exists on the PC side?

I would only correct that in the sense that because the PC architectures were designed for speed first you can't use that design at all. With a PC architecture you design it so that with everything enabled - when you are doing texturing, with trilinear filtering, with mip-mapping, with anisotropic filtering, with alpha blending, Z buffered, and fogged you want to still be producing one pixel per clock per pipeline, running at full throttle - if you were designing a cell phone chip that's a really bad architecture and the reason is because you are not always using all of these things at once ut even if you turn them off in the old pipeline the registers for them are there and they are getting clocked and you're burning power on that thing whether you like it or not. In the handset market you want to be much more statistically minded and look at how often people use each of the elements and only "pay as you turn on" and that architecture is totally different. So if you look at out lowest end GPU architecture it draws a few Watts, but our highest end cell phone architecture draws tens of mW's - you can't create those new order of magnitude without a fundamentally different architecture.

The levels of granularity in power management is now making its way back up to the desktop space though isn't it?

Yeah, its an issue of priorities. In the case of cell phones it power first, price second and performance third, and even there I would say its features first and performance last.

In the case of your PC graphics, though, the desktop parts are also used for laptops, which power must be one of the primary considerations?

Let me give you a counter to that. In mobile, meeting a power envelope is first - being absolutely the lowest power is not important, and there the difference. In notebook PC's we call it thermal design points, TDP's - if its a 20W TDP that's what you need to hit; in a cell phone its lowest power is best and the reason for that is the lowest power gets you the longest play time.

You mentioned that you see the console model being IP based, and it seems as though XBOX may be the last of the "per chip" cost basis, but initially when the noises about the next generation XBOX were coming around you appeared to say that you didn't really like that model then...

Oh, no, no, no, that's not the case; I didn't like the absolute amount in that model! Even though we are not delivering a physical product, but a set of software, effectively, and IP deal should still generate the right returns.

So would would it be correct in thinking that its not so much about the return on the royalties but more about the cost of what you would have to do to meet the demands?

The simple math is this: we have a finite number of world class engineers and I currently have them all fully loaded doing projects and if they were doing another project then the wouldn't be doing a project I currently have them doing. the projects that I currently have for them have some estimated return and if a new project has a substantially lower estimated return, relative to what they are currently doing, then you're losing money. So, just because something pays doesn't mean your not loosing money.

I understand you may not be able to talk too much about it right now, but I'm just wondering how you expect Playstation 3 graphics to differ from what we see here today?

Although I can't talk about it too much there are some things we know about the PS3. First, its got a Cell processor, and that affects graphics a lot, and second the front-side-bus is 7 times faster than PCI Express.

Do you think there'll ever be a push to see something like that in the PC space?

Well the PC industry is going to have to work pretty hard, but that's what our job is - compete against ourselves. If I can't deliver something that is at least better in our next generation then we'd be out of business.

Where do you see NVIDIA expanding next?

Over the course of the last 13 years we've really expanded peoples notion that GPU is much, much more than just PC graphics. When we first started the company people used to call us a VGA controller company, then a PC graphics company, but now they call us a GPU company, which is kind of nice. Now what I need to do is help people understand that the GPU is much more versatile than just PC's and computing and that I'm going to have a GPU in my cell phone, a GPU in my handheld, a GPU in my television. That's where we're going to expand, we're going to take GPU's into all of these rich displays. At the highest level, the way to think about it is that when we started the company the number of pixels that were manufactured on earth then verses now is extraordinary - in 1993 there were no LCD panels, and you certainly weren't going to fit a CRT in your pocket; that's our market opportunity!

We'd like to thank Jen-Hsun Huang for his time and giving us a little insight into his thinking and understanding how NVIDIA is driven.

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