NVIDIA has been under a lot of competitive pressure over the last year, but especially during the last four months as its primary competitor ATI has launched six desktop DirectX 11 GPUs and a complete Mobility Radeon lineup for notebooks. Over two million DX11 GPUs have been sold so far, all of them from ATI. NVIDIA had a fairly large presence at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but also had a series of briefings for select members of the press the week after CES. The embargo date is today, and some of the details that were discussed can be revealed.
NVIDIA is saying that GF100 chips are in production, but we don’t have details on yields or how many wafers are being produced at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). GF100 chips are being produced on the 40nm process, and ATI has had a hard time with the process since it first began the transition in March of last year. The GF100 has over 3 billion transistors, 50% more than the Cypress GPU which is fairly large at 334mm^2. Initial reports are that the GF100 will exceed 500mm^2, which means that there will be a lot of chips that won’t be able to run at full capabilities. We can probably expect defective chips to be used in cut-down GF100 variants.
