NVIDIA Corp. confirmed during its financial conference call possibility to showcase the company's much-anticipated next-generation graphics processing unit that some refer to as G70 and some others call the GeForce 7.

?We do have our next-generation GPU. We are really excited about it. Maybe next week you might get a sighting of it at E3,?said Jen-Hsen Huang, NVIDIA's CEO.

Some Asian media recently suggested that NVIDIA Corp.'s next generation product code-named G70 would demonstrated behind closed doors at Computex Taipei 2005 show that will be held in Taipei, Taiwan from the 31st of May to the 4th June, 2005. According to NVIDIA, the demonstration of a next-gen GPU, which is likely to be limited to the company's partners and media, is scheduled for next week.

According to HKEPC web-site, NVIDIA would offer three versions of its G70 graphics processor: G70 GTX, G70 GT and G70 (plain-vanilla). DigiTimes claims that the G70 would be two times faster compared to the current flagship NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra and would be made using 0.11 micron process technology at TSMC. Pricing for the top-of-the-range NVIDIA G70 version is expected to be $549 with volume production beginning in the latter half of Q3, 2005.

It is unknown whether the G70-series of the graphics processing units will get any feature-set upgrade compared to the GeForce 6800-series that supports Shader Model 3.0. It remains to be seen whether the G70 is to be called NVIDIA GeForce 7 or receive a different brand-name.

At this point it is unclear whether doubled performance of the GeForce 6800 Ultra means a substantial increase of pixel and vertex processors within the G70 chip from 16 and 6 of the predecessor, or a tangible increase in the clock-speed of the part from 400MHz of the GeForce 6800 Ultra, or both measures. The definition of ?doubled performance?is also unclear, as in different cases different benchmark results may be obtained.

NVIDIA representatives did not provide any information about the product code-named G70 beyond what the CEO of the company said.

For the first quarter of fiscal 2006, revenue increased to a record $583.8 million, compared to $471.9 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2005, an increase of 24 percent. Net income for the first quarter of fiscal 2006 was $64.4 million, or $0.36 per diluted share, compared to net income of $21.3 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2005.

Research and investment firm Goldman Sachs said in its report dated January, 2005, it did not expect NVIDIA Corp. to release a new graphics architecture earlier than in late 2005.

Meanwhile ATI is reported to have have postponed the commercial release of its much-anticipated code-named R520 visual processing unit from June to a later date.