Secrets of the Nvidia Titanium 500

As we said there, the memory speed is the same old 3.8 ns but now the memory is able to reach 250 MHz. To remind you Geforce 3 had only 230 MHz memory (466 MHz DDR). The same situation goes with Geforce 3 chip -- it was 200 MHz and now it runs at 240 MHz.

Here is how Nvidia managed to achieve this and as always we got these answers from Graphzilla itself.

GeForce3 Ti 500 uses the same architecture that Nvidia productized with GeForce3. However, Nvidia has spent a lot of time and engineering effort to make GeForce3 Ti 500 faster, including the following.

1) Nvidia worked strategically with TSMC to move the GeForce3 die into a "high performance" (meaning faster!) version of the 0.15u process technology. "TSMC doesn't do this for just anybody.....they did it for us because Nvidia drive *so much* business through their fabs. "

2) Nvidia re-designed the board. New board has an 8-layer design for the PCB [Printed circuit board] and a new power supply design

3) Nvidia worked strategically with the memory vendors (Elite and UMC) to fine tune the binning parameters on the memory, to allow us to clock 3.8ns memories at 250MHz, whereas with the original GeForce3 the 3.8ns memories were clocked at 230MHz.

This is what happens if you are rich and selling a lot of boards. We can say that Via also has some good relations with TSMC since it also produces an enormous amount of chipsets.

Funny that even though Via and Nvidia have become competitors in chipset arena, they make their chips at TSMC. As Alanis Morissette says: "Isn't that ironic, don't you think?" µ