Nvidia Accelerates the Production of 8800 Chips

I know that this is boring like hell for you, but you have to read this in order to see just how well is Nvidia doing. Several rumors around the web have suggested that a few days ago, Nvidia placed an "urgent order" to its chip supplier (none other than TSMC) in which they said that additional G80 chips are needed for the following period. The supplement should reach Nvidia by March and will be equivalent to 3 to 4 thousand 300mm wafers a month. And that quantity alone tells a lot about the hunger for DirectX 10.

What's new about these chips is that they will use the "80nm process technology". At the moment, Nvidia produces only 90 nm G80 so an 80nm line would be something really new on the market. On the other hand, it is also possible that the new chips won't be G80 flavors but rather the awaited G84 and G86 GPUs.

If you take into account that a single G80 chip has a total surface of 420 square millimeters you could get about 140 chips out of a single wafer. In a month that means about 400 - 600 thousands depending on the success rate (some of the chips come out defective from the wafer so the number of functional products is always lower than the theoretical one).

Now I know that there are a lot of demands for these cards, but such a supplement is somewhat meaningless, at least according to the actual sales. Unless Nvidia knows something we don't, I can't see a reasoning behind this idea. And don't forget that the R600 is not that far.