RUMOUR HAS IT that upcoming G92 is a mainstream chip, not the high-end refresh that the net has been wibbling about.
Well, we can tell you that this rumour is nothing else but a bit of good old FUD, since either G92 is a high-end refresh or the company decided that a replacement for 8800GTS will be significantly faster than GeForce 8800 Ultra, leaving its high-end offering in shambles.
This baby sports some serious shading power, but more important is the fact that the memory installed on board is now GDDR4. 768MB of GDDR4, to be more precise. The amount of memory discards rumours of 256-bit bus, since it is obvious that Nvidia will keep 384-bit memory controller for the high-end series of products. We would welcome this memory controller in mainstream arena, though.
The bandwidth has now jumped over the 105 GB/s barrier, and it remains to be seen what will be the final clock of the memory – our estimate is between 1.0 and 1.2 GHz, or 2.0-2.4 GHz, but final clocks are far, far from being decided. The company needs to get the revised chip first, in order to have DisplayPort working nice and cleanly. Display Port is required for this company to get the Dell XPS contract – a new machine will be launched for Winter 2007/08, probably during CES 2008 in Las Vegas.
The company has already had some revisions of the board sent to their favourite game developers and other partners, and we can now tell you that the board is almost identical to old 8800 GTX/Ultra ones.
We would like to see 1.5GB of memory on consumer boards as well - the Quadro FX already spots 1.5GB of GDDR3 memory- but it is all a matter of price. Qimonda’s high-capacity GDDR3 sounds very tasty for Nvidia plans, but for now. The reference boards sport Samsung GDDR4 chips.
We hope the situation about this upcoming silicon gem is now as clear as mud, not FUD. µ