NVIDIA 40nm GPUs in Sept

NVIDIA's first graphics chipsets based on a new 40 nanometer manufacturing process could be available by the start of the fall, a newspaper claimed on Tuesday. Taiwan's Commercial Times says the GeForce GT 220 and G210 are due to ship in late September. The story supports notions of a delay and says TSMC, which manufactures NVIDIA's chipsets, had initially suffered from poor yields of the 40nm parts but has since recovered and can supply enough for the last quarter of the year.

Already quietly unveiled by NVIDIA as OEM devices for computer builders, the GT 220 and G 210 are both expected to directly replace the GeForce GT 130 and G100 and take advantage of the much smaller, more energy-efficient 40nm process to ramp up their speed without using too much space or generating too much heat. The GT 220 in current form has 48 visual processing cores, a 615MHz core, and a typical 1GB of 1.3GHz DDR3 memory; the G210 is much more basic with 16 cores, a 589MHz core and 512MB of 1.4GHz DDR2 memory.

Whether the cards will be made available at retail isn't clear, though they're likely to show in retail-facing systems. Apple, for example, uses the GT 120 and GT 130 in certain iMac and Mac Pro models.

By Electronista Staff