Conclusion

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There is no doubt that the NV17M mobile graphics chipset is the king of the hill. At the COMDEX premier today, there will one or two laptop manufacturers announcing their support and implementations of the new technology. Toshiba is that launch partner with more announcing sometime this year.

What can you expect for the time approximate time to market? NVIDIA is quoted at saying around the end of Q1 2002. However, I wouldn’t put a seal on it. With the amount of time it took the original GeForce2Go to get to the end users, I expect it to be somewhat longer of a wait than that. NVIDIA will be using their experience in the market to push that along and they are working on a long-term plan to decrease the time to market with the MAP standard. In fact, if the MAP standard takes off, you can expect to see 6-month product release in the mobile market, much like the home market, as opposed to the 1-year launches they are having now.

NVIDIA also claims that there shouldn’t be a price increase of the new NV17M chipset over the launch prices of the GeForce2Go. While they wouldn’t discuss the cost directly, they said it would be competitive with the marketplace upon entry.

One bad note is that the chances are high that the first laptops to take advantage of the NV17M chipset will also be utilizing the new mobile Pentium 4 processors. NVIDIA has a close relationship with AMD and they are sure to offer some Athlon 4 based laptops before summer, but I know many AMD fans will be disappointed by having to settle for less than spectacular graphics performance in their notebooks.

What can we expect in the future of the mobile market from NVIDIA? Well, hopefully we will continue to see more powerful chipset being introduced and that many of the notebook manufacturers will take advantages of the MAP standardization. Any plans for having an nForce-based notebook chipset are still sealed from prying eyes; I think NVIDIA might be heading there. They have a lot of good experience from working on the development of the Microsoft Xbox on how to deliver compacted products to consumers, and they should want to take advantage of that. DDR memory systems in a laptop would sure be a welcome change!! Also, as the need for mobile workstations increase, we may be seeing an upgraded version of the Quadro2Go closer than we might expect.

I can’t wait to get my hands on these products and see how they perform up close and personal. In any case, NVIDIA stock owner’s surely have nothing to worry about!

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