http://www.beyond3d.com/#news22620


During NVIDIA’s recent conference call to discuss their latest financial results, the subject of 90nm chips was brought up. When questioned as to their plans for 90nm NVIDIA’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, replied that they currently "have two 90-nanometer products in production now".

Given previous comments from NVIDIA officials it would seem likely that 7800’s G70 chip would be the last 110nm desktop chip NVIDIA produce, with subsequent chips being 90nm based. It is expected that the high end G70 will also be augmented with lower end chips (G71, G72) to address the entry level and mainstream market positions – like the GeForce 6 series, which had the high end NV40 on the 130nm process and the lower end chips on 110nm, it would make sense that subsequent G7x based chips would be 90nm.

The question is exactly how "in production" are these chips and when are they likely to ship? Although its not a definitive, the PCI-SIG PCI Express integrators list has often given some leads as to pre-production chips, and whilst ATI’s low and mid range chips, which ATI are now stating will be available in October / September, have appeared on the list, but no newer desktop chips than G70 appear on the list from NVIDIA. Of course, NVIDIA have other projects that are not directly desktop graphics processors, and one of those 90nm chips could well be the RSX chip for Sony’s Playstation 3, which is known to be 90nm based.

Note that while the RSX chip will be coming from Sony's own fabs, our recent interview with Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that TSMC will be utilised for NVIDIA initial 90nm ramp, as ATI are.

On the subject of the PCI Express integrators list, one other interesting NVIDIA based product that has turned up on it in the latest update is "G70M", which most likely be a mobile version of G70 for desktop replacement notebooks. Its not particularly surprising that this should be the case given the number of clock domains that NVIDIA have built into the chip, allowing them to reduce power consumption in various ways across the pipeline, something that is probably targeted towards the notebook segment as its not that high a priority for desktop graphics yet.


G70M