Geforce 6 rumour mill starts up

THE NEVER ENDING procession of speculation about future products is in good shape today. Not content that nobody has a definitive specification of the Geforce 5 yet, somebody has decided that the Geforce 6 or NV40 is the next ripe target. Over on the FutureMark forums, someone has posted a lovely view of their crystal balls.

The post, which is here, has all of the right ingredients to get the technically less than savvy wetting themselves with excitement. Only it's crystal balls, emphasis on the latter, all over again.

The post claims that the chip will have be made on a 90nm process and run at 800MHz. All fine so far but then it says the chip will have 350 million transistors and have 16MB of DRAM on board. Oh dear. As though Nvidia didn't have enough trouble with a GPU a third of that size.

But outlandish speculation is fun so the INQUIRER has decided to get its own crystal balls polished and working. With absolutely no verifiable source whatsoever, here are the specifications for the NV80. It's not due for three or four years and the engineers haven't started even thinking about it yet but here are the details anyway:

Cell processor type architecture using 8 chips
512MB of processor speed SRAM L2 cache, 64MB per cell
1GB of texture RAM using cheaper DDR
Too big to fit on a single card, comes in separate box
Requires its own 430W power supply
Uses Hypertransport II 25.6GB/s link to the Northbridge

This information comes from someone who met an Nvidia executive at a party once but some of it may not be true. µ