Here they heard the same from their independent sources:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/new...n-schedule-for-q4-20092c-yields-are-fine.aspx
Lol, you expect Nvidia to have a smaller, less monolithic card? If so, I hope you are right as Nvidia will have a killer card on their hands. I just want a little.. tiny snippet of info on the new chip!!!
*Thread title changed.
I think it's getting to the point where I'm enjoying speculation more than actually using the cards.
I do think they will have a less monolithic design, at least if we compare it to RV870 which has 50% more transistors than GT200. The same sources that have been saying that yields were right, that is, the ones that do know what's going on, have always said the GT300 is smaller than 500mm2.
And it must be in order to make any sense given the rumored specs. Let's speculate. If Nvidia doubled everything the chip would have a maximum of around 2.8 billion transistors (2 x 1.4). RV870 is 2.15 billion transistors and 330mm2, so by the rule of three GT300 would be around 450mm2 plus minus something. That's far less than what GT200 was at launch and even less than GT200b and that's if they trully went with 64 ROPs which IMHO is very unlikely. Some leaked info a lot months ago said GT300 had 2.4 billion transistors anyway and that fits with the 512 shader cores, 32 ROP idea. 32 ROPs make sense taking into account how Nvidia links a 64bit controler to each 4 ROP cluster.
All in all the situation that hapened with RV770 vs GT200 will never happen again. Ati had a lot of advantages back then, like a smaller process and GDDR5. Now they have the same weapons and Nvidia has one advantage this time around, they will release later and they can change the clocks if necessary. GT200 could overclock a 20%, so imagine if Nvidia had released them later, after seing how RV770 performed. They could have used a 10% higher clocks, making the GTX260 a 10% faster than HD4870, while still leaving a 10% OC margin. It would have been a completely different story. HD5xxx don't overclock very well, so Nvidia can play that card, OR if they already are significantly faster, they could relax the clocks or the specs for the GTX360 and improve yields.
IMHO, considering how RV770 vs GT200 turned out, Nvidia has the winning hand in this round.