A Semi-accurate Look into Fermi

[LordEC911]

so A1 was a little under 500
A2 was over (but probably not 600 or they would have said so)
so A3 can probably be assumed at 650ish?

I would say 650 would be near the upper end of the possible clockspeed. I have been saying we would see G200-esque clocks for quite awhile now and no one wanted to believe me, though they were of the green tinted variants, just like how I have been saying that GF100 is very similar in size to the 65nm G200.

Their target was 750. We're looking at them missing that mark by a good margin, so 650ish sounds like good speculation to me

Yeah. Say good-bye to the estimated 40% advantage over Cypress.

That was what I read in the article, however I have the opinion that Charlie can exaggerate and perhaps use a bit of an artistic licence when it comes to reporting. I am still hopeful for Widespread availability in March.

I thought the Radeon 58xx launch here in the UK was awful, units have only just started shipping here in very limited quantities this past week, are you going to say that Fermi would be worse? and that we would need to wait until MAY?

Perhaps the respins are not only for hopeful increases in clockspeed but for bug fixes too?

John

He doesn't often exaggerate with the facts, when you can find them in his articles.

The UK has been getting a constant supply of cards, while that supply wasn't exactly huge, there was a supply. You seem to be implying no cards in the UK, which is false.

Yes Fermi availability will be worse, depending when Nvidia gives TSMC the greenlight on full production and if the yield numbers I have heard are still accurate for A3. I doubt TSMC will be running full tilt to ramp over the Lunar New Year and that Nvidia will have all the capacity they need to get all the boards ready in around 2-3 months for a real launch.

Let's break this down because you make some good points. First of all, not much is publicly known about how well the Fermi architecture will scale when it comes to anything but the extreme high end. That is to say that it may take a lot of doing for NVIDIA to adapt it to lower end, more mainstream cards. NVIDIA's past issues with scalability is one of the many reasons why we are only now seeing lower-end 200 series cards. ATI on the other hand is an expert on scalability as is evidenced by the quick succession of 5000-series releases. Only time will tell what happens when the Fermi architecture gets scaled down but one thing is clear: ATI has shown that NVIDIA can't continue to use G80 derivatives if they hope to compete in the sub-$200 price category.

Yep. With still absolutely no whispers of any of the GF100 derivatives taping out and the end of the year coming, the window on a 1H launch for any of them is getting smaller and smaller, unless Nvidia pulls a miracle and launches on A1 silicon.