The Morgan Stanley Semiconductor and Systems Conference was held earlier today, and among the speakers was NVDIA"s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang there to discuss NVIDIA"s business and its prospects. Very early on in the conference Jen-Hsun was asked if he"d like to talk about the NV4x generation of parts to which, in a possible reference to the performance of the NV3x generation, his quick response was "Nothing would give me more pleasure to talk about NV4x", and so he did. Jen-Hsun noted that that NV4x series was a new architectural generation that has been designed to offer specific goals: give more programmability, more performance, take advantage of the PCI-Express platform, have higher yields and to be very scalable.
When looking at the performance element of NV4x, Jen-Hsun expects the performance increment from the previous generation to be dramatically higher than any previous architectural transition they have previously been through. Indeed, presumably speaking about NV40 specifically, NVIDIA"s CEO states that "if we"re not a lot more than 2 times faster I"m going to be very disappointed". Upon discussing where such performance increases could come from he made note that due to the programmable nature of the graphics pipeline and that now applications are making use of this, more and more elements can be brought over from the CPU world to enhance the instruction execution performance, and its expected that NV4x will adopt a lot of these techniques.