Just as I'm listening:
- Margins to improve throughout the year, far beyond NV3x levels
- Profits to be flat to slightly up next quarter, with XBox finally rising after 2 declining quarters in a row
- NV4x biggest leap NV have ever taken
- Shader 3.0 "dramatically extends programmability"
- A dozen games and big engines are going to support 3.0
- 6800U designed specifically for enthusiasts, has lots of "frequency headroom", and comes with an
optional second power connector, required only for overclocking
- The GPU is affected heavily by the compiler, which is shipping at 1.0 and is very early. They expect big performance boosts in later drivers
- Quadro FX4000 is showing 38x performance in a specific app (didn't pick up which one)
- 3% Market share gain came from mid to low end boards, as opposed to the enthusiast segment.
- Shader 3.0, Superscaler, and programmable video processor made up the transistor count over and above ATi.
- 40% more transistors, yet only 9% bigger die. Costs 10-15% lower, with better process capacity.
- Redundancy and re-configurability in the NV4x, and "immunity from defects", to achieve great yields moving forward.
- Multiple NV4x chips taped out, a couple of them are back from an unspecified fab, and by Q4 everything will be based on NV4x. They refused to be any more specific than "by the end of the year".
- Talked about R420 being effectively a 3 year old architecture, and customers will pick the NV4x over that based on features such as Shader 3.0, since theirs is the only true next gen GPU
- Game Developers "clamouring" for their Shader 3.0 and FP Filtering tech, building lots of boards specifically for devs. Easier to write, with better performance. Conditional branches are heavily touted.
- ATi have hand picked boards to be sent to reviewers, each at a different speed (?), potentially confusing consumers. NVIDIA don't do this, and their boards are much better overclockers that the XT (due to the hand picking mentioned previously, apparently).
- PS2.0 vs PS3.0 will be a "glaring" difference, but HSI vs. native PCI-E is identical (including bi-directional bandwidth). Competitors are doing much the same, so it's costing them money as well.
- Competitors are going to hurt badly with PCI-E, since they'll have to build 4 or 5 extra boards.
- NV4x can operate in 3 modes: AGP8x, PCI-E, or PCI-E with HSI.
- Started arguing with one caller, who pushed them about whether PS3.0 will actually make any difference NOW. They went back and forth several times, and it got reasonably heated and amusing. They said they'd call the guy back after the conference call
