2. Lunch With Jerry

I was fortunate to meet with Jerry Chen, Mobile Graphics Senior Product Manager with NVIDIA. In addition to sharing friendly conversations about stories of traveling abroad and Buffalo Wings - incidentally, we just call them "wings" here in Buffalo - he also told me what he feels are the key features of both the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra and the rest of the Go family. The single most important point was the efficiencies gained with the architecture of the GeForce Go 6 series.

"It has 12 pixels per clock shader, and five geometry units - but a lot of the investment that we made in this generation has to do with the efficiency of the shader clocks as well. Although it is good to look at it from a course high level, it is also interesting to look at its efficiency. It is true for desktops but it is doubly true for notebooks, because it is all about efficiency. It is really all about what performance you can deliver within the thermal budget that you have to work with, basically, performance per watt. This generation, the GeForce 6 generation was our target. We made a decision back in 2003 because we had all of this great technology working for us so, do we put it in this generation or that generation. For notebooks, we decided to push everything to PCI Express. All of the designs that were really in progress were PCI Express. That had a couple of effects actually."

PCI Express? This connector looks very different from the MXM connectors we have seen in the past.

"In the notebook space, we knew the transition was happening, and we viewed ourselves as coming into the market as the upstarts. The vast majority of the market was owned by either Intel integrated graphics or ATI. So were coming in breaking into sockets. The sockets are either designed into the motherboard for integrated graphics, or had some kind of ATI socket. So, PCI Express is great because it is a reset of the entire industry. That is why we decided to throw so much investment behind GeForce Go family."

"The problem is that the very first PCI express notebooks that were supposed to launch in the summer of 2004 were already being locked down. Those designs were closing at the end of 2003, and we didn't have GeForce 6 at the time. Basically we walked away from those designs in order to target these designs. We were doing two things; we were guessing that the Sonoma launch would slip a little bit, and also trying to target the majority of the PCI Express notebook market and give up the very first PCI Express Notebook launch."

Although they were not first to market, it is clear that they have designed a product that has been able to snatch the mobile crown back - with a vengeance.