All the enthusiast gamers and tech savvy people out there must be aware of the recently launched Nvidia's top-of-the-line motherboard chipset nForce 680i, but there are just a handful who know that this chipset for the Intel Core 2 Duo platform has been entirely designed and created in India at Nvidia's R&D facility in Bangalore.
Techtree caught up with the two founders and Senior Directors of the Bangalore facility, Sunil Nanda and Sridhar Manthani. Before joining Nvidia, the duo was working with Intel. They joined Nvidia in 2004 as the first employees at Bangalore, and were entrusted with the job of setting up a full fledged R&D centre there. The Bangalore facility was founded in February 2005, with an investment of $1 billion, has grown from a team of 60 to over 170 now.
Explaining the team development part, Nanda said, "While building the team we handpicked the best and the brightest talent from the country and took them through various training and mentorship procedures and taught them about not just generic chipsets but also about Nvidia specific things from different domains such as graphics, motherboards, etc."
"It took around 6 months for the centre to get fully functional and get engaged in projects. The centre focuses primarily on two areas - motherboard chipsets and graphic chipsets for handheld devices in line with PortalPlayer."
PortalPlayer, a California-based chip maker was acquired by Nvidia last month. The company is known for its high performance system-on-chip (SoC) technology that powers some world-renowned digital music players.
Talking about their newest baby, the duo clarified, "nForce 680i is not just another product from Nvidia s product line but it's their flagship product. And it is completely designed and developed at the Bangalore centre."
When asked about Nvidia's decision to venture into Intel platforms after having produced excellent motherboards for AMD all these years, they said, "Nvidia is a company that looks to produce the best enthusiast products. Till early this year, AMD was the performance leader for CPUs, but with the advent of Core 2 Duo, Intel took the crown and therefore it was very critical for Nvidia to provide the enthusiasts with a platform that was Intel specific, highly overclockable, and get the best out of their powerful CPU."
According to Manthani, the technology that really helped them take off was the SLI technology. "It was very essential for Intel to use SLI technology if they had to show true performance."
Talking about the challenges while developing 680i, they said, "Nvidia had been majorly into developing AMD boards, and as we know AMD boards do not technically require a North Bridge as the memory controller is embedded into their CPUs. But for Intel, it is different; Intel boards need both North Bridge as well as South Bridge. So the key challenge was to work out a high performance North Bridge that could extract the best out of the Core 2 Duo and Kentsfield CPUs. Nvidia is the only company using Hyper Transport for the Intel Platform, as it provides faster speeds internally and enormous bandwidth. Another key objective behind developing 680i was that it should be most overclockable Intel platform ever."
The duo also revealed that there are other projects happening at the Bangalore Centre based on both motherboards, as well as hand held chips, which will be announced in 2007.
Source:
http://www.techtree.com/India/News/N...77364-581.html
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