Next Nvidia high end chip will be the G81

THE G80 replacement looks like it might be known as G81, and it appears that Nvidia will take the radical step of making it at 65 nanometre. That is what's been rumoured in China and Taiwan and according to sources close to or inside TSMC.

Nvidia holds the crown with G80 and the R600 is still over a month away. R600 won't win in all categories, so Nvidia might still be fine with an overclocked G80. Overclocked G80s are coming in volumes and we got a hold or few that we are testing at press time. Unfortunately, EVGA doesn't offer overclocked G80s in its step up programme.

G81 might not show its face that soon, but Nvidia is at least experimenting with a new process. We would be very surproised if we see high end 65 nanometre before the end of the second quarter but more realistically later than that. However, Nvidia has surprised us more than once in the last few quarters. Both Nvidia and DAAMIT need to shrink to 65 and we know that this step is a difficult one. AMD barely managed to move its CPU production to this shrink up and GPUs are far more complex and difficult. µ

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