NVIDIA creates flagship made-in-India processor

BANGALORE: At a time when the gaming community in the world is abuzz with the new releases of Sony’s Play Station 3 and Nintendo’s Wii, comes news closer home.

Graphic processor maker NVIDIA recently released the nForce 600iSeries chipset-a flagship product of the company-that was completely conceptualized, tested and designed in India. A gamer’s delight, this chipset is touted as the world’s best platform for PC users and those who crave better speed, performance and high definition graphics on their machines.

This processor has been specifically designed for the latest Intel Core2Duo and Core 2 Quad microprocessors. With this nForce 600i chipset family, the company is following a new nomenclature to distinguish its Intel and AMD products. NVIDIA chipsets will have “i” designation for Intel chipsets and an “a” designation for AMD variants.

Sridhar Manthani, senior director at the Bangalore center, said, “We have been working on the development of this product for the last 18 months. A core team of around 60-70 engineers at Bangalore worked on this project.”

The new chipset has already been launched in the US and has seen unprecedented sales already, with the company struggling to fulfill the overwhelming demand for the graphic processors.

The company started the R&D center in India two years ago in Bangalore and has seen its engineering presence grow from 25 to almost 600 today. This has also been aided by acquisitions- Pace Soft Silicon that has a center in Pune, and PortalPlayer, that has a center in Hyderabad.

The Indian engineers are also working on next-generation processors, integrated graphics platforms and also developing solutions for handhelds.

Besides focusing on development efforts, the company is also engaging the Bollywood studios and film makers in India in a program called “Digital Bollywood.” In this initiative, the company is trying to create a bridge between Hollywood and Bollywood by bringing to India some key technicians such as Volker Engel, the Oscar and Emmy Award winning producer and visual effects supervisor in Hollywood. “There is no dearth of content in Indian films but the intention is to help Indian film makers create visual effects that are of world-class quality,” said Manthani.

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