Rumor: NVIDIA 40nm cards to be less complex and cheaper

Theo Valich reports NVIDIA is finally opting to reduce the cost of manufacturing of its high-end and performance graphics cards. Yesterday Expreview wrote NVIDIA is going to roll out a cheaper GeForce GTX 260 and Theo claims NVIDIA's going to focus more and more on cutting manufacturing costs. He heard the complete 40nm lineup is being designed with cost-effectiveness and scale of economics in mind, and writes the upcoming 40nm performance GPU from NVIDIA will have a roughly 20 percent cheaper production cost.

According to this manufacturing expert close to the company, complete 40nm line is being designed with cost-effectiveness and scale of economics in mind. Number of PCB layers went down even on the GT212 part, and late P8xx and early P9xx designs are a clear testament of changes that are going on in Nvidia’s engineering departments in APAC region and of course, in the US.

Many designs are finalized and are now in the process of refinement, but this should lead to dramatically lower cost of manufacturing, thus giving flexibility in pricing. On the example of upcoming performance part, we were cited 20% cheaper cost of production. 20% is a large number given the fact that Nvidia will implement GDDR5 memory, but this is a normal result - the moment Nvidia started to think with their wallets, instead of ego - improvements were under way. So, we will have GT212 with more complex memory controller than ATI’s RV790 and RV890, yet cheaper to produce due to all the advantages of GDDR5 memory combined with the optimized design of the PCB itself.