14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA's consumer-ready, Fermi-based GeForce graphics cards are most likely among the most anticipated products this year, as they are said to provide users with an increased level of performance, as well as new features. Although previous rumors indicated that the said cards would be available on November 28, it now appears that they will most likely be launched by early December.
The updated rumor comes from Fudzilla, which claims, in a recent news article, that the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker plans to update its line of GeForce graphics cards by early December. In addition, the company is also said to be taking pre-orders for the GF100 GPU, although its partners have received no guarantees on the final shipping date for the fresh graphics processor. Nevertheless, the “first week(s) of December” appear to remain the most likely estimation.
Designed on the 40nm manufacturing process, the new NVIDIA GF100 graphics processing unit is expected to end-up significantly faster than AMD's Radeon HD 5870 flagship card, although we still have no specific numbers on benchmark results, clock speeds or any other specification.
NVIDIA has apparently placed orders for large quantities of 40nm chips, although this won't solve an expected problem with shortages from day one, especially since there's heavy demand for these chips. The company will target the workstation and HPC markets first, as the Fermi architecture is expected to deliver a number of features and performance enhancements in those segments.
With rumors of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 5970 GPU currently going around on the Internet, there are also questions of how the single-GPU GF100 graphics card will perform against a dual-GPU solution from AMD. Nevertheless, before we jump to any conclusions, we should take all of this with a grain of salt, and wait for the official debut of the much anticipated card.