The road ahead for Nvidia

What’s in store for Nvidia Ion and Nvidia GPUs?

 A week ago, Fudzilla, had a chance to interview Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO and president of Nvidia. The interview revealed the future growth strategies and business plan of Nvidia. Jen-Hsun strongly believes that the graphics card of the future will evolve into a full-fledged co-processor. Although the CPU will still remain an important part of the computer, but it will take care of serial data, while the GPU takes care of parallel data applications i.e. the applications that can be further subdivided in smaller time slices. The GPU co-processor will be able to accelerate many applications including video encoding and transcoding. The CPU and GPU will complement each other and will be able to perform tasks much faster by working in cohesion.

The next thing that Jen-Hsun disclosed was regarding the Nvidia Ion platform which essentially uses an Intel Atom processor along with Nvidia GPU to provide HD support and superior graphics performance on netbooks/nettops. Users can expect more devices based on the ION platform as Nvidia expects to increase the ION netbook/nettop market share following the introduction of Windows 7. Users can also expect to see an ION platform that supports dual-core processors before Christmas.

Jen-Hsun also said that the Intel’s new Larrabee GPU is not a threat to Nvidia because he expects many driver related issues with Larrabee. The only thing about which he is a bit concerned is that Larrabee will be very good when it comes to a parallel data processing and it will definitely give Nvidia’s parallel computing a run for its money. Jen-Hsun also said that the company will start to worry about Larrabee when it is actually launched.

When asked what he thinks about DirectX 10.1 support in Nvidia hardware, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that incremental updates of DirectX are not important. The only thing that excites him is DirectX 11 but, it will take at least a year to see games running on that platform.