Thursday 27th November 2008

UPDATED: Rumour control: 40nm Nvidia and ATI GPUs in early 2009

Posted at: 11:20am 27th November 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Reports from Taiwan claim that Nvidia and AMD have contracted TSMC to build 40nm chips in the first quarter of 2009

Nvidia and ATI have already produced GPUs on a 55nm process, and we’d assumed that Nvidia would be moving its GeForce 200-series GPUs to the 55nm process early next year. However, if reports from Taiwan are true, both Nvidia and ATI could have plans for 40nm GPUs as early as the first quarter of 2009.

Taiwan Economic News reports that both Nvidia and AMD plan to contract Taiwan’s huge independent silicon fabrication firm, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), to build the chips with the 40nm facilities it announced in March this year.

The site claims that ‘Nvidia plans to have its high-end GT216 chips made using 40-nm process next quarter,’ and that ATI has similar plans for its RV870 chip. AMD slides from CEATEC last month showed that AMD was planning a move to 40nm chips in 2009, as well as widespread use of GDDR5 memory, but this is the first news we’ve had about the chips being made at the beginning of the year.

With smaller transistors requiring less power, a 40nm high-end GPU could potentially enable Nvidia to compete with ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 in the dual-GPU graphics card market again, although it would be interesting to see what ATI does with its 40nm GPUs too.

We’ve asked both AMD and Nvidia to clarify whether these reports are true, but in the meantime we’re going to put it down to rumour. It’s also worth noting that although the chips could be made in the first quarter of next year, it would still be a while after that before graphics cards were available to buy.

UPDATE: We've yet to have confirmation from Nvidia about this, but a spokesperson from AMD has just confirmed to Custom PC that 'this is in fact the case,' so this is no longer a rumour as far as ATI GPUs are concerned.

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i would still rather they design a new monolithic GPU. ATI think they are smart doing this dual core nonsense but they arent, it depends so heavily on the game and the drivers whether two GPUs work well. this is coming from someone who uses SLI. first hand experience, truly dual GPU is still far more of a performance and stability headache than having a single very powerful chip. isnt it a very similar situation we faced with going multi core CPU? so many games could only use one core, now we finally reached a point where most games use at least two cores, but still only a miniscule amount use 4. before all this dual core GPU trickery is actually going to be better than a monster monolithic we need yet another software revolution, where EVERY game scales brilliantly with two GPU's

Comment by vulcanproject at 4:17pm 2nd December 2008

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@jonisaksson

You might well be right, but I think it's more likely that they'd use a 55nm part for that. I don't believe a 40nm processor will arrive any time soon and when it does at the very least they'll have improved the 280 design. (What about multiple core?)

Comment by Cybersciver at 1:49pm 30th November 2008

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AMD and NVidia High-Kdielectric process next

Both AMD and NVidia have yet to use High-K. Combine this with 40nm and its a major power saving difference. (AMD CPUs are going High-K in 2009).

Comment by tron1 at 1:49pm 30th November 2008

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@Cybersciver

I am guessing it is a lot easier to make GX2 GPU than creating a new GPU. Hence a quick and easy win, while their engineers design the next gen GPU

Comment by jonisaksson at 6:03pm 29th November 2008

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Umm...

Why does everyone seem to think that Nvidia would use a 40nm chip to make a GX2 GPU? It's such an enormous shrink they could come up with a processor with twice as many transistors as a 280 and still improve the yield. Power requirements would be a lot less than a 65nm 260X2.

Comment by Cybersciver at 1:59pm 28th November 2008

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260 GX2 is probably just possible on 55nm. even with a good shrink to 55nm a single 280 would pull at least 210w. realistically more like 230w. you cant really make a dual board card that pulls much more than 400W, you will otherwise need more than two 8 pins for stable power! 40nm is totally another story though.

Comment by vulcanproject at 12:23am 28th November 2008

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@Isitari

Not to knock your physics, but many people seem to think a GTX260 X2 is possible on 55nm, let alone 40nm. Sure, you won't get 'decent' temperatures with any top end GPU these days unless you at least use water cooling, but it is doable on air still - even if it then means you've got a small frying pan in your case.

Comment by TWeaKoR at 10:49pm 27th November 2008

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All I Want For Christmas

nowt im gunna just wait 3 or 4 months for a new mbrd cpu ram and a gpu . this isnt the well before its time fools day prank ha ha made you all wait for nothing .jj7

Comment by kingjohn721 at 8:54pm 27th November 2008

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I still doubt even at 40nm that a GTX 280 X2 would be viable as the heat output from the 65nm chips is colossal and I it would be output many Watts of heat at 40nm. The TX 260 X2 may though be possible by my rather rudimentary calculations (I teach Physics) if they possibly use vapour chamber cooling for decent temperatures of maybe a triple slot fan assembly for just about cool enough temperatures.

Comment by Isitari at 5:34pm 27th November 2008

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this is a pretty major leap for the top end nvidia part, anyway. GTX280 would actually be viable as a GX2 product on 40nm should nvidia choose. it should also hopefully herald the next generation of nvidia mid range cards. lets be honest they are overdue. nvidia's only real new card are the GTX2 series. everything else is based on the year old G92 unlike ATi who turned up with an entirely new range top to bottom this year. nvidia certainly need something to combat the 4850, 9800GTX+ roots are much older. a new midrange? something along the lines of 160SP card? in between the 4850 and GTX260? lets hope so