Nvidia's NV40 tapes out

WE CAN FINALLY confirm that Nvidia's NV40 taped out in the last days of December of 2003 and that Nvidia is working hard to finish everything up before boards using the technology go on sale.

Nvidia's partners are still without chips and it seems that they will got their sample NV40s to do necessary PCB adjustments no earlier than late February 2004.

It's going to be a close call whether Nvidia partners manage to show some products at CeBIT and it will be great loss for a them if they don't since ATI will show off the R420 at the Hannover show.

It takes around 120 days from tape out to final shipping products so it seems that we might see cards based on NV40 shipping in April or May.

We do believe that Nvidia will use CeBIT to trumpet its NV40 technology, however.

The fight between NV40 and R420 will be very interesting but we don't believe that either chip will be significantly better than the other, with both having similar performance. µ