Graphics chips outpacing Moore's Law

By Jack Robertson EBN (07/16/2002 4:33 PM EST)

SAN JOSE, Calif.-- Graphics processors aimed at the PC for the last five years have been following an accelerated version of Moore's Law, doubling performance every six months instead of every 18-to-24 months for their counterparts, a key Nvidia Corp. official told EBN Tuesday.

Dan Vivoli, vice president of marketing for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based graphics chip firm, interviewed at the Platform Conference here, said he thought the triple-speed graphics Moore's Law "will continue into the foreseeable future."

Graphics processors don't use die shrinks to drive performance, but put more functions and capability on the new die which remains the same size as before, he said. "We can put more algorithms on the die and drive more pixels in parallel, increasing performance dramatically," he added.

Electronic game consoles, such as Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox which Nvidia supplies with graphics and I/O processors, are at the opposite technology scale, upgrading only every four to five years, Vivoli explained. "For this reason, the PC will never be replaced by consoles as gaming platforms," he predicted.

The Nvidia official denied this was any slur on Xbox, which he called "a great device, which had the most successful first year sales of any game console in history. It's just that the economic model of consoles demands that they retain the same box for many years. Game developers don't want to obsolete theirsoftware before four to five years."

Vivoli said Xbox continues to be a growing revenue source for Nvidia, accounting for about 15% of total chip sales.

He said the current Xbox pricing dispute was in no way related to any move to get lower parts cost, but involved proposed pricing for changes that Microsoft wanted to add to the Nvidia's Media Control Processor for the game machine. "We couldn't reach an agreement on prices for the change, and we are in arbitration now," he said. Although the difference is only a matter of a few cents, the return over tens of millions of chips over the next few years is sizable, he added.

The Nvidia marketing chieftain said the firm's next generation NV30 graphics processor, due out this fall, will be its first to use 130 nanometer (0.13-micron) processing. TSMC is the foundry that makes virtually all of Nvidia's chips.