when compared to fiscal year 2008. However, the overall global economic recessionary climate contributed to a significant decline in the demand for total graphics during the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2009. If consumer preferences towards notebook PCs, and away from desktop PCs, continue or escalate, we may see further declines in sales of our Desktop GPU products. In addition, if the global economic climate does not recover during fiscal year 2010, or deteriorates further, we may see consumer preferences move towards lower-priced notebook PCs, which may negatively impact sales of our Notebook PC products.

 

    Professional Solutions Business

 

    Our PSB is comprised of our Quadro professional workstation products and other professional graphics products, including our NVIDIA Tesla high-performance computing products. During fiscal year 2009, we launched several new Quadro solutions, including the Quadro FX 3600M Professional, and the Quadro Plex D Series, a dedicated desk side Visual Computing System, or VCS, system that also can be configured (using two Quadro Plex D systems) for a 3U configuration. We also launched five new Quadro FX notebook GPUs that spanned from ultra-high performance to ultra mobility, as well as the Quadro CX accelerator for Adobe’s Creative Suite 4, or Adobe CS4, content creation software.

 

    During fiscal year 2009, we also launched the Tesla C1060 computing processor and the Tesla S1070 computing system. Tesla is a new family of GPU computing products that delivers processing capabilities for high-performance computing applications, and marks our entry into the high-performance computing industry. The Tesla family also consists of the C870 GPU computing processor, the D870 Deskside Supercomputer and the S870 1U Computing Server. We believe we are in an era of GPU computing, where our Compute Unified Device Architecture, or CUDA, parallel processing architecture can accelerate compute-intensive applications by significant multiples over that of a CPU alone. NVIDIA CUDA is a general purpose parallel computing architecture that leverages the parallel compute engine in our graphics processing units to solve many complex computational problems in a fraction of the time required on a CPU. In order to program using the CUDA architecture, developers can, today, use C, one of the most widely used high-level programming languages, which can then be run at great performance on a CUDA enabled processor. We expect other languages to be supported in the future, including FORTRAN and C++. With CUDA, we are able to speed up general purpose compute-intensive applications like we do for 3D graphics processing.  Developers are able to speed-up algorithms in areas ranging from nano molecular dynamics to image processing, medical image reconstruction and derivatives modeling for financial risk analysis.  Many PC OEMs now offer high performance computing solutions with Tesla for use by customers around the world. Researchers use CUDA to accelerate their time-to-discovery, and popular off-the-shelf software packages are now CUDA accelerated.

 

    We have achieved a leading position in the professional graphics category