Nvidia is actually pretty happy when thinking about the merge between Ati and AMD. When asked how is that possible, Nvidia officials replied that any merge between 2 large manufacturers almost always translates into significant roadmap changes and by that it actually slows down the company's pace, making it lose a lot of precious time. And Nvidia plans to use this advantage by leaping forward as fast as it can, hoping that Ati & AMD won't be able to keep up the same speed. Nice idea and actually quite true. What remains to be seen is whether Nvidia has the resources to do that. And TSMC says they do.

As some of you might already know, TSMC produces most of GeForce series chips since 1998 when the first 350nm wafers were developed. Although Nvidia tried to use other manufacturers such as IBM for some of its products, it appears that the partnership with TSMC seems to work better, as they are already launching 65nm process. However, we are still waiting for the final product, since no 65nm GPUs are available on the market. At least not until now.

Several internal sources confirmed that - during the last weeks - Nvidia made several requests to TSMC manufacturers in order to have the confirmation that they will be able to mass produce the new G80 incorporated in the new 8800 series.