Nvidia's G80 will stay a 90 nanometre chip

NVIDIA currently owns the best card on the market. The Geforce 7950 GX2 is the best performer that money can buy. And the firm doesn't want to lose its current advantage while planning to upgrade its current generation with a new, faster chip.

We wrote before that the new G80 will feature 32 pipelines and 16 vertex + geometry Shader but now we've also learned that the chip will be developed on the older 90 nanometre process.

Nvidia doesn't want to risk the shrinkage to 80 nanometre. Its experiences with its own NV30 taught it not to take the unnecessary risks with chip shrinkage on such important chips.

It all makes sense now. The G80 is taped out. The first silicon is back and the company is about to get it in production. The announcement is imminent and the new chip has every chance of outperforming ATI's upcoming R580+ based Radeon X1950 XTX.

G80 is also expected to use GDDR 4 - but we have been surprised before. We don't know how G80 performs versus R600 but we know it is set to arrive a few months before the ATI's expected R600 killer. µ