Posted on Tuesday, February 24 2009 @ 19:22 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
FUD Zilla
claims the low-end GT218 will be NVIDIA's first 40nm GPU. The chip will replace the GeForce 9500 GT and is expected to arrive in April.
Nvidia traditionally starts its transition to a smaller manufacturing process in this market, as its less complicated, less risky and once it gets the smaller manufacturing process stable, then it can transition mainstream, and ultimately, performance and high end chips to the new process.
The 40nm process is a full node, and is not an optical shrink, which makes things a bit more complicated then with an optical shrink, but 40nm should also bring lower power consumption and higher clocks.
