G71, Geforce 7900 GTX taped out

WE HAVE confirmation that Nvidia has now taped out its G71 chip. It is up and running and according to our sources Nvidia is on schedule.

The only problem is that we're unsure what the real schedule is. I can tell you that it is probably not realistic to expect this chip and cards based on G71 sooner than end of February. Early March could be the best bet, but this is the perfect case scenario. It is a long time from tape out till final chip and we know that Nvidia taped out the chip in the first half of January.

It's possible that the G71 may get its old GTX suffix. Nvidia hopes the G71, Geforce 7900 GTX may end up even faster than R580, Radeon X1900 XTX solution but we cannot confirm that. For Nvidia's sake, we hope it will and the chip should have 32 real pipes inside.

So Nvidia finally has its big 90 nanometre chip out from the blueprint specs. The fun chase begins again. µ