Nvidia plans autumnal chipset assault

This includes a new king of the hill as well, the almighty G92 - also known as the GeForce "9800". Nvidia is paying quite a lot of attention to thermals and performance of the chip in complex shaders.

G92 was not the only product that was taped out, but we're waiting to dig out more details of these. However, one of the chips is Nvidia's counter to RV680. When it comes to manufacturing, Nvidia moved away from 80/90nm manufacturing processes over at TSMC and opted for a new manufacturing process.

Knowing Graphzilla's brilliant record of accomplishment and 100 day "tape-out to retail shelf" policy, the new GeForce should debut in late October or early November. However, our sources told us that company is now devoting key time to fixing problems with the existing GeForce 8000 series of cards, caused by "buggy chips", as one source put it. This might impair the performance of initial drivers.

After seeing all the problems that plagued owners of Radeon HD 2000 and GeForce 8000 series of cards, we must start questioning whether the industry going in the right way.

One Quad SLI source said: "If I own a Ferrari, I expect that the value of the car will grow, but even if it does not - I do expect a premium service. With these two boards, I got worse treatment than a person who bought a €99 card, and I spent more than 10x that - €1100."

It will be interesting to see what will happen in Autumn. However, if you are expecting a G92 versus R680 battle, you might want to wait until after Yuletide. AMD is focusing on R(V)670 right now. µ