Nvidia rushes ahead on its G70 plans

NVIDIA IS FAR ahead with development of its G70 announcement. It will take place in less than two weeks, while R520 is still down the road, and with no fixed launch date yet.

Some sites on the net are claiming that R520 is the next NV30, has leakage problems and is pretty much falling apart. You can check such claims here. We know that information comes from Nvidia as it wants this kind of FUD about its competitor component out.

We can confirm that the first R520 silicon did had some problems and that chip is re-taped out again and most of the problems are gone. We confirm that 90 nanometres is a risky process, but it seems that ATI knows what it is doing. Even if ATI decides to go for 24 pipelines, the yields will be acceptable at least according to our usually very highly reliable sources.

It's really time to start calling G70 by its godfather Dan Vivoli given Geforce 7800 name. Nvidia is briefing the press at San Francisco as we speak to teach them all they need to know about the latest greatest G70, Geforce 7800 GTX.

Even though it sounds crazy, we have a strong belief that ATI hasn't shown the real McCoy to Dell and HP as it doesn't want Nvidia to know the details until it's too late.

ATI plans to finalise R520 details just after Nvidia releases the G70. It's a dirty trick, but this is business. After ATI released Crossfire, its dual VPU thing, Nvidia didn't have any other choice than to release a new chip. ATI is becoming faster in single, X850XT PE and dual cards as some of our colleagues proved in Taiwan. Mind you, Crossfire is not available yet. That makes a difference, as Nvidia knows with SLI.

Taiwanese partners still haven't seen R520 and I believe that ATI wants to keep this card for itself till it figures out how many pipelines should it enable. It would be bad to show the card faster than the one that it plans to ship. ATI will make R520 as fast as it should be, just to beat G70. We heard at least some game developers have seen R520 but I guess that we are talking about those loyal to ATI. We know that the guys at Remedy have those cards, because we saw them running them.

TSMC doesn't have any demand for 90 nanometres from ATI but I guess ATI is still not close to production. It's still tuning the chip. Like we said, a 24 pipes part will have acceptable yields for high end product and if it comes to 32 pipes yields won't be that good but it will be a very fast card. Whatever happens with R520, R580 will have all 32 pipelines enabled.

One of the best comments about R520 is that Richard Huddy, ex Nvidia and now top ATI developer spinner, hasn't made any bold claims to the press about R520 dominance. He is being uncharacteristically quiet.

So Nvidia wants you all to believe that G70 is the winner and ready and R520 is a bad leaky product, not ready, not good, late and not here. This is the Mandy Rice Davies refrain. She was more attractive in many ways than marketing types.

We still have strong reason to believe that ATI will shock you all, but Nvidia announcement still comes first just less than a two weeks now. µ