NV36 and NV40 produced by IBM

The Inq reports some info about nVidia his upcoming GPU's the NV36 and NV40, their info comes from a report from Economic News. According to them IBM will make the NV36 and the NV40 chips for Nvidia, while nVidia his current partner TSMC will make the RV360 and R420 graphics chips for ATI.

The report adds that the NV40 will have 300 million trannies and run at 600MHz, use special DDR-II memory and be produced at the IBM foundry at .13µ (micron) towards the end of the year.

IBM has lowered prices on its wafer tech to compete the harder with TSMC, while the Taiwanese foundries are cutting costs. Currently, TSMC makes 95% of Nvidia's chips, the report added, while a staggering 11% of TSMC's revenue emanates from Graphzilla.

But IBM Micro and TSMC have very different models – and Nvidia is desperate to reduce costs on .13µ chips. Nvidia is forced to pay for a whole wafer from TSMC, which includes duff chips. With Big Blue, customers only pay for good chips. µ

Some if this information is wrong however. nVidia does not pays TSMC for a whole wafer, they only pay TSMC for working chips. nVidia is the only one who has got this privilege from TSMC according to NFI. Also NFI writes that the NV40 will not have an insane high number of 300 million transistors, but 150 million transistors.

Source : The Inquirer and NFI