NVIDIA to finally launch the GT 400?

What seems to be a long delayed launch, NVIDIA is finally launching their long anticipated hardware featuring the much talked about Fermi architecture this March during PAX East during March 26, 2010. So what's taking NVIDIA so long?

NVIDIA has been taking a new route in order to put as much punch into their architecture than usual. This generation they are going to use up to 3 billion transistors on a 40nm SOI process. Issue with such a giant chip is that even if TSMC didn't have yield issues, any defects on the wafers would still spread on more of the cores created on the wafers. This is because they are simply larger and there are fewer of them than before. To help illustrate this, Anandtech has simple diagrams to help illustrate the issue.

Theoretical dies, as you can see that the one on the left has more smaller dies, defects affect less of the individual dies. On the right, dies are larger, so each defect will affect the dies by a larger proportion. Image courtesy of Anandtech.

As you can see, having a larger die means that the yields are even worse. NVIDIA may be able to pack a larger punch but due to the fact that they can't scale the manufacturing process, it is more than likely this launch will have very small quantities at launch. The prices for these cards would be out of reach for most gamers due to its scarcity and high demands. In my opinion, there won't be enough GT400 cards until Q3 - Q4 2010. Reasons behind this is that TSMC hasn't been able to completely rid of their yielding issues due to the move to the 40nm process.

NVIDIA isn't the only company faced by the 40nm transition. AMD has been on this bumpy path since they launched the ATi Radeon HD 4770 last year to test out the new process shrink. The number of cards sold is a great indication that the 40nm process wasn't ready for mass production due to the yielding issues TSMC is having.

It is noted that AMD is moving its GPU manufacturing to GlobalFoundries which AMD spun off and partly own in order to take advantage of the 32nm process (or at least rumoured to be). This should get AMD a better position for manufacturing cards instead of relying on TSMC for their next generation cards which are rumoured to appear as early as late this year.

I believe that NVIDIA would have a successful launch but won't be in full force until late this year. Most likely NVIDIA will have enough cards out on the market by the winter holidays for the Christmas shopping season. However, I wouldn't say that there would be a massive stock by at least September. I'm sure there would be people crazy enough pay hefty premiums for the cards.