Shift from 90nm to 80nm not so risky?
The Inquirer's ever controversial Faud is reporting that it wouldn't be very risky for NVIDIA to produce the upcoming G80 GPU at 80nm because the shrink can be done at the fab and not in the chip development stage. Regardless of NVIDIA's reasons, launching G80 at 90nm and later tweaking and moving to 80nm gets NVIDIA their typically faster "refresh" product, while their engineers can focus on the next gen.
"When you go to 80 nanometre you have to design your logic and even the floor plan at 90 nanometre and all you have to do is the optical shrink in the fab. At the litho stage of chip development you just produce a smaller geometry and that's it. If you want to go from 90 to 65 nanometre you have to remake the chip virtually from scratch and to make all transistors, gates and logic 65 nanometre compliant."
