Nvidia attacks INQUIRER piece in email blizzard

Needless to say, the now-darkening working day in Taiwan has been a particularly interesting one.

The statement reads:

We have been receiving some questions and concerns about an article recently posted on The Inquirer claiming that there is a bug in G84 and G86 preventing chips from downclocking into 2D Mode. This article is not correct at all. Please pass the following response on to anyone else who may have concerns on the matter:

There never was, and never will be a "2D Clock Mode" on desktop versions of G84 and G86. The power requirements for these GPUs are low enough to begin with - there is little to no power savings to be had by down clocking into a 2D mode, at least for desktop usage.

We have invested considerable effort into power efficiency in our GeForce 8 series architecture. Our 8800 series has been widely recognized as having an excellent performance/power ratio and our upcoming 8600 and 8500 series will share this distinction.

So, was Charlie off the mark?

First of all, we know Nvidia's Taiwanese partners know exactly what they have been promised, without having to re-read their archived emails.

The 2D mode is still set to return for mobile G84/86 parts, GeForce Go 8600 and Go 8500. Whether there is a problem with 2D Mode and it was disabled in the first rev desktop part, or if there is a real problem in the first batch of chips is largely irrelvant.

But there will certainly be a second batch of chips that will feature 2D and 3D mixed mode, as our own Charlie wrote in his article.

Both the G84 and G86 chips will come in a second rev and these will be oriented towards notebooks, as is usual.

Will those parts see the light of the day as desktop parts? If history has taught us anything (the 7950GX2 is one example of using mobile chips in desktop cards), again, yes.

Bear in mind that it is insanely expensive to develop and produce two different chips that are almost identical, and that graphics chips of today serve as both consumer and professional parts (for example: GeForce and Quadro).

The second rev is usually shipped as both desktop, professional and mobile parts (for example, GeForce, GeForce Go, Quadro). Chips hand-picked from the middle of wafer are sold either as mobile or overclocking parts to notebook vendors or premium card manufacturers.

We won't go into whole HDCP how/yes/no situation with G86 chips and the mandatory addressing of that situation in second rev of the chip. µ