Anna (X-bit labs): As far as I know NVIDIA may claim that there was not that much investment into the RND: only about 50 engineers. Is this the result of the fact that Sony’s own engineers contributed to the development of the GPU in a significant way?
David Roman: We do not disclose anything on the actual resources. Obviously there is a major economy of scale. This chip is a custom version of our next generation GPU. So we’ve been working on the next generation GPU for close to two years now, namely about 18 months. I don’t know the cost of this one but I know the cost of the last generation: it was 350 million dollars. These are expensive chips to develop. So, the fact that we didn’t have to do that development just for the Sony application obviously is a major economy of scale, because we are doing the development for the new chip anyway. The amount of work involved into customization, I don’t know. I know that we designed a new generic team, we had been working with Sony before on the actual development platform, we had actually been working on the details of the chip. We now have assigned an engineering team to work as a Sony engineering team. And the numbers? I don’t know what the numbers are but I am sure they are growing, but there is a lot of work that’s going on. As I have said we do not disclose the details, but there is certainly some economy of scale due to building it on the technology that we have been working on for a long time. So, it is the next generation of GPU.
