During a conference call with financial analysts, chief executive and president Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia, the world"s No .1 supplier of GPUs, happily announced: "Since October, we shipped nearly 400 thousand of GeForce 8800s. Our focus for desktop GPU is to leverage our leadership position with GeForce 8 into the mainstream market." Meanwhile, rival ATI, the graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, plans to release the DirectX 10 Radeon X2800-series (code-named R600) in March. "The GeForce 8800 has beaten the competition to market by well over six months and counting," Mr. Huang boasted.
The head of Nvidia also confirmed that the company has plans to release a family of GPUs for notebooks based on the GeForce 8 architecture in time for Intel"s code-named Santa Rosa platform launch, which is likely to be late Q1 or early Q2 2007: "We are ramping production on our GeForce 8 family of notebook GPUs, the industry"s first DX10 and high-definition video GPU for notebooks." Huang noted Nvidia will see over a half of its revenue coming from the GeForce 8 family in late Q3/Q4: "I think in terms of units, it is going to take well into the latter part of the year, if not early next year, and the reason for that is because the GeForce 7 is such an incredibly efficient architecture and it is the lowest cost "Vista Premium" solution that we know. In terms of the revenue crossover [...] my guess is that it is probably going to be late Q3, Q4 timeframe," Mr. Huang said.