NVIDIA hiring eDRAM engineers - for Sony's PSP2?
Monday 15th January 2007, 12:12:00 PM, written by Arun
A quick look at NVIDIA's website will reveal that they are currently looking for eDRAM engineers.
It's worth noting that they have never shipped any such design, and it
seems extremely unlikely to us that anyone in the industry is planning
to use eDRAM on products aimed at the PC market. As such, this could be
a further confirmation that NVIDIA has the contract for Sony's PSP2
handheld.
Indeed, the original PSP has plenty of eDRAM (2MB for the GPU alone), and the PS2 GPU has its fair share of it too. These chips are manufactured in Sony's own fabs, which thus seem rather well tuned for it. It has already looked extremely likely for a while that NVIDIA would get the contract, as past financial conference calls have had Jen-Hsun Huang say that he believes the original PSP's graphics chip will be the last one developped in-house for any console or CE device. That wouldn't theorically exclude AMD from the contract though, of course - and while it's likely it has been decided by now who won the contract, it's also impossible to be sure.
Still, this eDRAM job offer is a further confirmation of NVIDIA's likely contract with Sony on this project, which you would expect to see shipping around 2009, given the traditional industry cycles. Assuming a royalty-based model, likely per-unit revenue would be between 3 and 5 dollars, in addition to one-time payments. That's not a lot of money for either NVIDIA or AMD nowadays, but it remains financially appealing because of the 100% margins associated with the deal.
UPDATE: Read this.
Indeed, the original PSP has plenty of eDRAM (2MB for the GPU alone), and the PS2 GPU has its fair share of it too. These chips are manufactured in Sony's own fabs, which thus seem rather well tuned for it. It has already looked extremely likely for a while that NVIDIA would get the contract, as past financial conference calls have had Jen-Hsun Huang say that he believes the original PSP's graphics chip will be the last one developped in-house for any console or CE device. That wouldn't theorically exclude AMD from the contract though, of course - and while it's likely it has been decided by now who won the contract, it's also impossible to be sure.
Still, this eDRAM job offer is a further confirmation of NVIDIA's likely contract with Sony on this project, which you would expect to see shipping around 2009, given the traditional industry cycles. Assuming a royalty-based model, likely per-unit revenue would be between 3 and 5 dollars, in addition to one-time payments. That's not a lot of money for either NVIDIA or AMD nowadays, but it remains financially appealing because of the 100% margins associated with the deal.
UPDATE: Read this.
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