Yesterday, we linked to a rant by Charlie Demerjian of SemiAccurate, who claimed mainstream derivatives of Nvidia’s GF100 graphics processors had yet to move beyond the drawing board. Today, X-bit labs quotes a statement by Nvidia head honcho Jen-Hsun Huang that seems to corroborate the alarmist wing of the rumor mill somewhat.
According to the CEO, Nvidia is doing just fine with its current line of mainstream graphics products:
All of that just depends on 40 nm supply and we are trying to finesse it the best we possibly can. For the entry-level products, the truth is that the new architectures […] are probably not extremely well appreciated anyhow. People, who buy the new architectures, tend to be early adopters and they tend to be the game enthusiasts, workstation designers or creative artists or – there are very specific reasons why it really enhances their experience. Our current-generation GPUs are fabulous and all the things that mainstream consumers would use their computer for.
Huang went on to predict that his company’s current-gen GPUs "are going to continue to do quite nicely in the marketplace," although he vowed to transition to newer products "as fast as we can."
To the CEO’s credit, few games out there have DirectX 11 support at this point, and Nvidia has managed to stay roughly competitive on the performance front as far as sub-$200 desktop graphics cards are concerned. However, at the higher end of that market, the company is still forced to compete using larger, more power-hungry graphics processors made using 55-nm process technology, which may be cutting into its margins.
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