Nvidia's first 40nm chip might be coming in April of this year. We are talking about the Geforce 9500GT replacement and this is the chip that is meant for OEMs and the low-end market.

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.

Nvidia has many 40nm chips aligned for this year and ultimately even DirectX 11 in 40nm should be available sometime late this year. We are not aware of GT218 architecture details, but we know that it is almost done.