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NVIDIA CES Press Conference

January 7, 2010

Las Vegas Hilton-Las Vegas, Nevada

Due to some horrendous transportation issues we were unable to bring people live coverage of NVIDIA's CES Press Conference. We hope people can accept this as a form of amends. We have done a summary of the press conference below, which people may want to stick with, because the press conference is over 76 minutes long. However, here is a link to the entire press conference and as a note, the 3-D part of the press conference that starts 58 minutes in, cannot be viewed in 3-D even with the aid of 3-D glasses: http://ispss.istreamplanet.com/nvidia/

The press conference opened with the mandatory several minute long video package demonstrating the overwhelming power of the NVIDIA graphics processors. This included scenes from the movie Avatar and one of the Transformers movies.

Once the video package ends, the founder of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang, takes the stage to the song "Click, Click, Boom" by Saliva. That is pretty clever and also happens to be a good song.

Huang says that 2010 will the be the beginning of the tablet revolution. This meshes with what Microsoft talked about the previous day with the slate PC's they see as a big part of the future. The Internet is no longer a resource, but an App. He cites that thanks to Farmville, which went from 0 to 78 million users in roughly 6 months Facebook is now the fastest growing gaming platform in history. He has already explained that websites do not look good enough on phones at this time, with substantially limited resolution, but people always want to have the Internet with them. However, they do not want to have their laptop with them due to its limited battery life and how much they value it. Huang notes he would be happier to lose his wallet then laptop, because of all the important things he has on his laptop. The stuff in his wallet could be replaced much easier.

He says they have a new graphics chip that will power these tablet PC's. It will give them the power of a regular PC, but they will only use as much energy as a regular cell phone. This is their new Tegra. It took 500 engineers to design this chip, and is the most major undertaking in the history of NVIDIA. It has 8 independent processors. It has a Dual Core Cortex-A9 CPU, which makes it the first tablet PC to have a dual core processor. It has 10x performance of an average smart phone. That will give it 4-to-8 times better resolution than on the average smart phone. (Yes, that is a shot at the iphone.) It still only runs on 500 milliwatts, that is the equivalent of a cell phone, or 20 times less then that of an average laptop.

Huang then brings out the Tegra to show people. It is about 3" x 3" and requires no heat management, fans or anything to keep it cool. It simply requires electricity, and very little of that. On 1 charge, it will be able to play 140 hours of music, the equivalent of 200 CD's, and 16 hours of HD video.

Mike Rayfield, the General Manager of the Tegra Business Unit, is now being called out to demo the chip. They are going to use a 7" ICD tablet that Verizon is using at CES to demonstrate 4G. Apparently, this part of the presentation was not thoroughly rehearsed. The tablet is running Android and Huang, who has a Blackberry, has no idea how to use the different operating system. Therefore, Rayfield is going to have to help out a lot or this could get painful. Huang is going to begin by going to amazon.com. To show how unrehearsed this is, he is openly shocked at how fast the website loads at 4G speeds. This is amusing.

Rayfield has a different tablet. He shows off a lot of the expected features. For example, checking the weather around the world, looking at photos and how you can view movies. Movies can be viewed in 1080p and via an HDMI cable the tablet can be connected to a television and everything can be viewed there.

Huang brings out a third tablet to show off how it can be used in various ways for ereaders with the ability to use even less energy. They then bring out a fourth tablet to show the new G.I. Joe movie playing in 1080p. For the record, it looks good. (The video quality, not the movie.) They then show a trailer for Iron Man 2 streaming off the Internet in 1080p on a regular Intel PC and on a tablet running the new Tegra. The PC feed is a mess. The audio and video are not synched. Also, it has to keep pausing to buffer to maintain that terrible quality. The video on the Tegra is phenomenal. Everything looks great and it looks like a movie people should go out of their way to see. This brings applause from the audience, which is hard to do this early in the morning. Huang says with all of these abilities, he can imagine a tablet PC in every room. At this point, Rayfield exits the stage.

Adobe Air is going to be ported to Tegra. This is key, because it will allow people to subscribe to digital magazines on Tegra, such as "Wired". This is different from the Kindle, because the Kindle is just text. This will include all of the color pictures and photos in high resolution.

Now, Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games, is coming to join Huang on the stage. Sweeney is here to show off that Tegra will allow for the Unreal Engine to be ported to mobile devices. A practically giddy Sweeney then reveals a fully functioning version of the Unreal Engine ready for mobile platforms using Tegra. Sweeney says it has the same feature set as the version available to developers for the XBOX 360, PS3 and high end PC's. The demo appears to be just a tech demo, but it looks like a very high end version of "Doom". Sweeney is asked to compare this to the Nintendo DS. His response is that this is decades ahead. He elaborates that the DS is equivalent to about a 1998 PC. Using this new version of the Unreal Engine, developers will be able to build games the equal of modern PC games for mobile platforms. Sweeney says Tegra is the equivalent of graphics chips that would be in high end PC's in about 2007. The head of Epic games leaves after saying he believes in 10 years they will have movie quality graphics in video games across all platforms and that now appears to include mobile. It is then announced that the development kit that was running that game is currently available for order.

Mathias Halliger, the Chief Architect of MMI Infotainment Systems at Audi, is being brought out to discuss how NVIDIA is making cars their new mobile platform. The announcement is that starting this year, most Audi's in America will have NVIDIA chips in them. Then starting in 2012, all Audi's worldwide will be powered by Tegra. They are now going to demo this new technology, which will begin shipping with the new Lamborghini's.

The press conference has now entered James Bond territory with this demo. Halliger is controlling an elevated computer on the dash, while working the stick shift with the same hand. The car is connected to the web, and he has just connected to google maps. He is then zooming in all with his right hand still firmly planted on the stick shift and no where near the touch screen on the dash. Huang recommends people pull over to do this. Halliger, who must be a really good driver, says people can do this while shifting on the road if they want. There is also a second digital display in front of the driver to distract people, too. There is a touch screen writing pad in the dash, and potentially on the wheel. It is getting a little confusing here. The map is of Germany. A lot of it has been translated to English, but clearly not everything. Then, to show off the writing function they are searching for a restaurant the serves pig shoulder (?). The search term is in German, which is making things more confusing.

They have now selected the restaurant. The computer then plots the route via google maps and displays it via that bright screen on the dashboard and a smaller screen in front of the steering wheel, next to where it lists what speed the car is traveling. Then the bright screen on the dash can be closed or remain open to allow people to see a more detailed view of their route. In this case, the screen is closed for the demo to continue. Of course, they immediately open it back up again to select what music they want to play. They show that music can be played off many different sources including an SD memory card. (This leads Huang to complain that his Ferrari only has a basic radio.) Halliger decides to play "Born in the U.S.A." by Bruce Springsteen off the album "Born in the U.S.A." The screen then displays the album cover for "Born in the U.S.A." to go along with all of the usual data as the song begins to play. They pull out of that to choose another song and are given a slideshow look at all of the albums in his collection via the in-dash screen. A key point is that they have changed music with the display and kept the GPS open via the display in front of the driver. All of this is done, without a hand leaving the stick shift or steering wheel. Therefore, this supposedly makes the car safer. That is compared to using standard maps. Halliger's section is concluded after it is declared this is now the world's largest mobile computer.

NVIDIA is going to conclude by talking about 3-D, this will be done with a 3-D PowerPoint presentation. Three companies are going to be announcing high-end gaming notebooks that are 3-D ready out of the box using NVIDIA technology today. The belief is that all future gaming PC's will be designed to include 3-D. A lot more standard PC monitors are now being designed to work with the NVIDIA 3-D technology. (The 3-D technology for Blu-ray has been standardized, but not for glasses. That poses a serious problem for the marketplace going forward. There are now at least 3 sets of 3-D glasses floating around that may or may not work certain screens. There will be a lot more on this when talking about Sony.) Huang beliefs that pretty much every new game is 3-D compatible. He says they have checked out over 400 that have worked, so far without a failure.

They are now going to demo a game in 3-D. That game is Avatar from Ubisoft. It is the PC version of the video game adaptation of the movie. The game was also up and running in 3-D on the PS3 at the Sony booth at CES. (There is no firm release date for the 3-D version of the game on the PS3.) The PC version will come with a special edition bundle that includes the NVIDIA 3-D kit, not sure of the release date.

They are now showing 3-D photos they took with a regular digital camera. Next is Blu-ray in 3-D on the PC with some other add-ons to improve the audio being demonstrated by showing some movie clips. The first is a trailer for the Disney movie "A Christmas Carol". (The new version starring Jim Carrey, not any of the many other versions they did that were better.)

Apparently, there is a 3-D plug-in for youtube. Using a basic Fuji camera, they are able to upload movies and view them in 3-D with the NVIDIA technology. Appallingly, this will probably be one of the fastest areas of growth on the web. At the time this was broadcast there were already 5,000 videos on youtube's 3-D channel.

Huang is going to conclude with a quick mention of next GeForce graphics processors. It is codenamed GeForce GF100 and is already in volume production. The big new feature is what they call 3-D vision surround. They are showing 3 screens linked together playing the Avatar game. It is essentially creating a 3-D Imax gaming experience. They are showing 6 million pixels rendering at 120 Hz. That is 3-times the resolution of HD television running at twice the refresh rate. This will become the new standard for high performance gaming. That concludes the presentation in strong fashion.

We should have more CES coverage for people very soon. The goal is to post some more PC stuff in the next few days and then finish with Sony. That should include footage of the Sony CES Press Conference that we were unable to cover for the same reason we missed the NVIDIA Press Conference. For subscribers to f4wonline.com, we posted a small bit on the upcoming 3-D XBOX Live Arcade Game "Scrap Metal" that can be found here: http://forum.f4wonline.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=82448&start=150