THE SAGA of Nvidia's GT300 chip is a sad one that just took a turn for the painful when we heard about first silicon yields. Nvidia's execution has gone from bad to absent with low single digit yields.
A few weeks ago, we said that Nvidia was expecting first silicon back at the end of the week, the exact date was supposed to be Friday the 4th plus or minus a bit. The first bit of external evidence we saw that it happened was on the Northwood blog (translated here) and it was a day early, so props to NV for that. That lined up exactly with what we are told, but the number of good parts was off.
How many worked
out of the (4 x 104) 416 candidates? Try 7. Yes, Northwood was hopelessly optimistic - Nvidia got only 7 chips back. Let me repeat that, out of 416 tries, it got 7 'good' chips back from the fab. Oh how it must yearn for the low estimate of 20%, talk about botched execution. To save you from having to find a calculator, that is (7 / 416 = .01682), rounded up, 1.7% yield.
Nvidia GT300 yields are under 2%
Bookmarks