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."
Marco Chiappetta
Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com
