Discussions on 40nm
contract prices, GT300 yields
In the second
half of October, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will travel to
TSMC headquarters in Hsinchu, Taiwan to discuss contract prices for 40nm GPU
chip production. In addition, he will be making the trip to meet with the company’s
motherboard and graphics AIB partners.
Discussions will be held with TSMC chairman Morris Chang
regarding full-scale 40nm production. Meanwhile, Jensen will also be checking
up on the current 40nm yields, which TSMC claims have risen from 30 percent to
60 percent in July.
Interestingly enough, Digitimes is reporting that Jensen will
check up on the company’s long anticipated high-end GT300 GPU, which it says is
expected to launch in December. As we have reported several times, Nvidia’s hopefully
redesigned GT300 architecture is expected to launch in late Q4 and more
specifically before the end of the year. Several sources have been claiming
November to be the launch month, but it should be noted that Jensen has command
over this decision and he could very well put the chip launch in December.
Even if something goes wrong, Nvidia will still show its
hardware in late Q4 2009 just as they did with the Geforce GTX 295 dual-GPU and
ship it in early Q1 2010. If this is to be the case, then the highly
anticipated flagship GT300 dual-GPU card would likely make its way into retail
channels during CES. All in all, let’s hope for Black Friday season launch on
this one.