http://today.reuters.com/business/ne...yID=nN23330678
Thursday 23 March 2006, 4:04pm EST
SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 23 (Reuters) -
Graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. said on Thursday it has a new design
contract with Sony Corp. that will pay more than it earned for
creating the graphics processor for the upcoming PlayStation 3 video
game console.
Sony paid Nvidia about $30 million for designing the PS3's graphics
chip, a fee that was paid out gradually as work on the processor was
completed, Nvidia's chief financial officer Marv Burkett said.
"We had anticipated that (contract revenue) would drop off, but that's
not going to happen," Burkett told financial analysts. "We have new
contracts with Sony to do some further designs."
Revenue from the new contract would be "probably slightly more" than
the first and would continue into 2007, Burkett said.
Burkett declined to reveal what the design work was for.
"We have a contract to do engineering work for them. I don't think I
should discuss what that product is," Burkett said.
Nvidia is expected to have revenue of about $2.8 billion this year, so
the new design work would be just a small slice of its overall
business.
In the case of the PS3, the engineering contract is the smallest of
three revenue streams Nvidia collects. It also gets a licensing fee
paid out each quarter until mid-2009 and collects a royalty on each
chip Sony makes.
Nvidia's chief competitor is ATI Technologies Inc. of Canada, which
makes the graphics chips for Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 game console,
which went on sale last November.
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set-top box , other consumer electronics versions of RSX ?
PSP2 GPU ?
PS4 GPU ?