The rumour mill re-opens for business.
We've caught wind of NVIDIA's next wave of graphics cores from a very unlikely source, but that doesn't necessarily negate their truth (nor remove the possibility of falsehood).
Claiming that the cards will simply be a redesigned GT200 chip, the only thing that seems to have been changed is the memory interface and naming structure, something that NVIDIA have been incredibly guilty of in the past.
GDDR5 seems to be the flavour of the new cards, with the rest of the card surmisably similar to the already-existing GT200 series-based cards in terms of core speeds and stream processors - though a clockspeed increase might not even be coming:
Pair this with the fact that Nvidia partners are reporting shortages of 2xx chips, and you have all the makings for hilarity. No parts, but if you make them slower, you can call them new, and pretend they are faster, even if you can't ship them to your customers.
Charlie Demerjian hasn't always been the most even-handed when it comes to anything NVIDIA-related, so take this news with a large pinch of salt, but it does seem to support the fact that NVIDIA are having problems.
Whether or not those problems can be solved is another thing entirely, but with news of ATI's 5-series cards slowly filtering through to Atomic already NVIDIA will need to get something out soon or lose the busiest tech time of year.
Head over to SemiAccurate for more on the rumoured GT300 products, and post below with if you think GDDR5 and a clockspeed drop even makes sense.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009