System-on-a-chip is the future of computing. Right now GeForce 6 has 250million transistors. Next generation will be from 0.5-1 billion transistors. These systems are going to come one day, the only question is how they become relevant in the market.
Image processing is also picking up as one of the most popular tasks nowadays. The media processor business is also very important for the consumer electronics. And already now we see a lot of steps undertaken in this direction. On Tuesday night, for instance, next generation Sony Playstation was announced. So far NVIDIA refused to disclose any more details, but we know that it is going to be a very powerful platform. NVIDIA is building a custom GPU on the architecture beyond GeForce 6 for Playstation 3. Graphics technology is certainly one of the most important things NVIDIA is working on regarding this platform, but there is the whole variety of other things including software tools and other technologies, that are also worth paying special attention to. You can also find more info about this upcoming gaming console in this news story of ours.
As for the long-term projects and direction NVIDIA is going to take, it looks like the next 20 years will be about digital media, consumer electronics, intersection of computers and consumers, and this is where NVIDIA is strong right now and will remain stronger ever after, because this promises to be a very large market.
Introducing NVIDIA GeForce 6200: More Details about TurboCache Technology
The next presentation was delivered by the General Manager for desktop GPUs - Ujesh Desai and his colleagues. The major highlight of this presentation was the new TurboCache technology, which is supposed to become a new word in the entry-level market segment.
The major advantages of the new technology should be really tremendous. First of all, TurboCache is going to fundamentally redefine the price to performance ratio that NVIDIA will deliver to an entry level PC. TurboCache allows direct rendering to system memory and significantly reduces local frame buffer requirement. Also TurboCache delivers shader model 3.0 to entry level solutions.
As an example of the TurboCache technology in operation we had the chance to see a demo from the new Half-Life 2 game running on a system with GeForce 6200, high quality textures, and 1024x768 screen resolution.
NVIDIA architectured 6200 around PCI Express interface. As you know, it is a very high bandwidth bi-directional bus. The local frame buffer is typically 64bit wide. PCI Express offers more bandwidth than most of the graphics processors have when they are attached to the local frame buffer.
Modern 3D applications are increasingly shader, texture and storage intensive. They have a lot of surfaces to be rendered and have very high texture and effects requirements. Namely they require on average 256MB of addressable memory if the quality settings are set all the way up.
