Alas, the day has finally arrived for Nvidia to terminate production of its GeForce 500 Series single-GPU flagship card, the GeForce GTX 580. The card that many enthusiasts all referred to as "GF110" is finally going EOL (end-of-life) as of April 2012.
Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580 is based on GF110, a second-generation 40nm Fermi chip that ended up producing noticeably more efficient performance-per-watt over its GeForce 400 Series predecessor, the GeForce GTX 480 (GF100). The secret to the company's improved performance and yields on second-gen GF110 chips ultimately came from a monitoring and rearranging of the transistor paths that caused most of the leakage on first-generation GF100 in real-world environments. As such, many of the segments on Nvidia's ~530mm2 GF100 die were rearranged to better improve efficiency and power consumption, resulting in a slightly smaller 520mm2 GF110 die for the GeForce GTX 580.
As many avid GPU enthusiasts remember, the card was launched on Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 at a suggested MSRP of $499, although many retailers began selling them for around $50 higher at $549.99 and £425, respectively. As of now, the card has been on the market for just over 1 year and 5 months.
Meanwhile, adoption rates of Nvidia's new 28nm Kepler-based GeForce GTX 680 (see: GK104) have been soaring and we expect the company will have some nice margins to play with on this newer, significantly more efficient GPU until it releases the rest of its 28nm Kepler lineup over the remainder of 2012.
