After a lot of rumours about bad yields with GT300, Nvidia has decided to talk to us and give us a simple quote about the state of its next generation 40nm product line.
Senior manager from Nvidia has told Fudzilla that “Our (Nvidia’s) 40nm yields are fine. The rumors you are hearing are baseless.”
This comes after some stories that GT300 yields are really bad and that next generation Nvidia is in really bad shape. According to AMD’s competitive analysis team, only nine chips should work per wafer, but they got this number due to a bad translation and we can definitely dismiss this number as completely inaccurate information.
As we've said before, the chip we call GT300 is a completely new design and it simply could not come out earlier. Nvidia certainly doesn’t like the fact that ATI is first with new technology again, but it comforts them that they can make its DirectX 11 faster.
You can expect a lot of architectural changes - the chip is completely redesigned and much faster than the GT200 generation. We would not be surprised if Nvidia starts talking about the chip ahead of official announcement as it currently hurts from positive Radeon 5870 reviews around the globe.
Fudzilla - Next generation Nvidia 40nm chip yields are fine
September is the month when 40nm next generation architecture, something we call GT300 should get taped out. We can confirm that this has already happened and that some VIP analysts and investors have already laid eyes on this DirectX 11 card.
If you do the math, it takes at least six weeks after tape out to release the card and get it ready for full scale production and if the tape out occurred on the first days of September, the full production can start in the middle of October. It is always at least six weeks.
Nvidia was always aiming for a launch close to Black Friday, the first Friday after Thanksgiving and this year it is on November 27th. It is important to launch the product before this date as most of the shopping is usually done around this date.
If something goes wrong with Nvidia's schedule, they can easily start shipping in December time, but the worst case scenario is to show the card in the next few weeks just to keep the fanboys comfortable with waiting for the next Nvidia's DirectX 11 offering and ship it as soon as possible.
You might remember they did this with Geforce GTX 295 last year, and it did work for them.
Fudzilla - GT300 is taped out
November is looking to be an exciting month as we hear rumblings of a launch of AMD's Radeon HD 5850 X2 and HD 5870 X2. In fact almost all of the news lately has been about AMD's new DX11 40nm GPU. The question on everyone's minds was the same - Where is NVIDIA?
We are happy to report that we were correct in our earlier predictions that the
GT300 is farther along than many other sites were predicting. We hear that NVIDIA has made an official statement on the state of the GT300 yields.
It seems that the GT300 has been taped out long ago and that yields are fine.
This statement comes from a senior product manager for the GT300, but we also have this from our own sources [who have been saying this all along].
So where did the rumors of sub 2% yields come from? Well according to the unnamed source it looks like AMD's Competitive Analysis team mistranslated some information that stated only 9 chips per wafer worked. This information quickly spread around the internet and became what we like to call "the repeated truth". Bear in mind that this was the same team in charge of spreading rumors that Larrabee is now in its third or fourth generation of silicon, which is direly incorrect. But we'll address Larrabee and the turmoil there in a future article.
Our sources [and the senior managers] are still saying that the GT300 is slated for a Q4 2009 launch. This means that you should expect the new GT300 to show up around the end of November. This is most likely a follow up to Editor's Day that should happen at the beginning of November. Most likely nVidia is pitching the GT300 chip exactly three years after its revolutionary G80 [also known as NV50] architecture, pitching it right around Thanksgiving, however from what we are hearing it is looking more like the very end of November or early December.
Still with this news it does take a little notch out of the AMD announcement. We are sure that NVIDIA will be making more information public as the momentum grows around AMD’s new 5xxx series GPUs. After all nothing works better to kill potential sales than leaked information on a possibly better product. Since we already disclosed some GT300 performance figures, expect an interesting war of words.
We all will have to wait to see if the GT300 can outperform the HD 5870, HD 5850X2 and the HD 5870X2 but as the current HD5870's margin is not that big we might see an interesting upset. No matter what the outcome the GPU race is certainly going to be very interesting in the coming months.
OFFICIAL: NVIDIA says GT300 on schedule for Q4 2009, yields are fine - Bright Side Of News*
