GF100 to be followed by a cheaper chip for mainstream cards

Feb 25, 2010 15:33 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA is undoubtedly happy about the likelihood of its Fermi GPUs not suffering from the same handicap as AMD's early DirectX 11 releases, namely inventory constraints. With the last of the issues related to TSMC's 40nm process slated to be resolved by mid-year, NVIDIA can advance its architecture and more seriously plan the development of additional, more cost-effective and affordable graphics chips. Since the company is planning on using the Fermi in mostly all of its future graphics products (including GeForce, Tesla and Quadro), the GPU maker is reportedly already intent on bringing out a GPU cheaper than the GF100.

The GF100 is an expensive chip and, while it will likely serve enthusiasts and hard-core gamers well, it won't exactly be approachable for most mortals. As such, it makes sense that the company would be making a different GPU for the mainstream and entry-level segments. XbitLabs reports that NVIDIA will definitely bring next-generation business-aimed Quadro cards during 2010, along with a mainstream GPU.

“Fermi will show up as the GeForce and Tesla first and it will definitely show up first in the highest-performance configuration. Sometime in the mid-part of the year we will see a lower-cost version of that come out both for Quadro and Tesla,” David White, chief financial officer of Nvidia, reportedly stated at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference.

“We did something different when we announced Fermi: we announced it at a compute conference, not a graphics conference. A lot of people interpreted that announcement to mean that this is compute device and we are giving up gaming. That is not the case. Fermi is an entire architecture and it is a modular architecture that allows us to scale the feature-set depending on the market need. So, we will [be] taping out and announcing a whole stack of Fermi products that will be very specific for computing at the very high-end of the stack and others will be targeted at desktops and personal computing,” he added.

The first Fermi cards are currently scheduled to enter availability in March. Mainstream chips are reportedly going to debut around the middle of the ongoing year or later on.