Interview with Tom Petersen – technical marketing manager NVIDIA MCP Group

We recently had a chance to sit down with Tom Petersen, the technical marketing manager of the NVIDIA MCP group and find out what’s new and have him answer some of the questions that our readers have been asking.

LR: So, what’s new?

NV: Wow! That’s a loaded question! Seriously though, things have been crazy here! We’re working on so many things, there’s barely time to breath!

LR: What’s so crazy?

NV: It’s an interesting time of year. We’ve got a couple of major trade shows coming up in March-Cebit and GDC-and right after that we’vegot E3 and Computex. All of these shows are a great place to showcase new technologies and products, and trust me, we’ve got a lot of things in our product pipeline!

LR: What new products?

NV: Well, you know we can never talk about unannounced products. But for those of you lucky (or not lucky) enough to be attending Cebit in early March, you’ll see some brand new products on display at the NVIDIA booth, and at many of our partner booths as well.

LR: Can’t you give us a hint?
NV: Nope, but given that I work with the NVIDIA MCP business group, I’m sure you can theorize the types of products we will be showing.

LR: New core-logic solutions?

NV: (laughs) Well, that would certainly be an educated guess!

LR: Talking about core-logic, NVIDIA has been on a tear lately. What’s the secret of your success?

NV: Well, we are an extremely focused company. When we originally launched the NVIDIA nForce product line about 5 years ago, we were concentrating on the enthusiast market. Obviously, our NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 and NVIDIA nForce4 SLI MCPs are the hottest products available today for both AMD and Intel platforms, and we have more than 50% share in this market segment alone.

LR: Why are you only focused on enthusiast platforms?

NV: We’re not. In 2005, we launched our latest solution for UMA platforms-the NVIDIA 430/410 family, which paired our award-winning core-logic with our award-winning GeForce GPUs. We launched these products in October and it quickly became one of the fastest product ramps in terms of revenue in the Company’s history. We also have a full
family of scalable MCPs for the professional markets-NVIDIA nForce Professional-which are targeted for the AMD Opteron-based workstation and server markets.

LR: How are you doing in those areas?

NV: We are doing great. The adoption rate for NVIDIA nForce Professional MCPs for AMD Opteron-based workstations is about 100%. For AMD Opteron-based servers, a market which is primarily served by AMD chipsets, we currently have about 25% market share. All of the leading workstation and server companies, including HP, IBM, Sun, and FSC, all utilize NVIDIA nForce Professional MCPs. It’s a growing business for NVIDIA and you will be hearing a lot more about our growth in these segments throughout 2006.