It seems AMD wasn’t very pleased with the fact that NVIDIA was trying to launch GT200 before AMD got a chance to present RV770 to the world. The GT200 launch seem to be set for middle of June, the 18th to be more precise, which would have coincided with AMD’s launch of RV770. AMD therefore decided to speed up its launch by moving it to the 16th, which doesn’t really change much, but now RV770 will be first on the market. And yes, GT200 has been renamed from the GeForce 9900 series to GeForce 9800GTX 200 series. The GeForce 9900GTX will now be 9800GTX 280 and 9900GTS will become 9800GTX 260. We’re not certain what NVIDIA will do to the already existing 9800GTX at this time.
The only problem is that the chips are targeting two different price and market segments. RV770 is, and has always been, a mid-range chip, and GT200 the extreme high-end. AMD will compete with GT200 with its dual-chip 4870X2 card, while NVIDIA will compete with RV770 by stripping down GT200 into several more or less crippled versions. Just like it did with G92.
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DisplayPort has been foretold to replace DVI in 2011 already, by analysts at In-Stat. They say that the number of DVI-equipped devices will have declined from 112 million compatible devices in 2007, to 3 million in 2011. The hardware manufacturers’ growing interest for DisplayPort comes from DPCP (DisplayPort Content Protection), a standard developed by AMD based on 128-bit AES encryption, which is suppose to protect the signal from being decrypted by non-DPCP certified devices. The fact that DisplayPort is free of royalty and license fees is an important part of it too.
The main threat to DisplayPort is HDMI, which is basically identical specifications, formfactor and features-wise. The biggest difference is that DisplayPort has been specifically designed for connecting a computer to a PC monitor, while HDMI is intended for connecting media devices, such as set top boxes and DVD players to HD-compatible TVs.
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If you haven’t already seen them, there are a couple of reports around the web with some mixed information about the R700 series from AMD. It’s now certain that the cards will be called Radeon HD 4000, and the first card will be Radeon HD 4850 on June 18th, and don’t worry too much about the availability, it’s a hard launch. It will be followed by the Radeon HD 4870 one week later, but the availability will be a problem because there aren’t enough GDDR5 chips yet.
Much More Further Reading.
GeForce 9900GTX is one of the proposed names of NVIDIA’s GT200-based graphics card. After NVIDIA’s recent revelation that it had realized that its product branding may be a bit too complicated for new consumers, it seems that GT200 may become the first card to use a new naming pattern. This is still unconfirmed on our part, although other have posted it as certain. In any case, pictures of the “GeForce 9900GTX” cooler has surfaced over at Chinese site PCOnline.
Further Reading.
NVIDIA has been experimenting with moving its G92 core a 55nm process for a short period of time. It seems to have gone fairly well because it has added the 55nm version of GeForce 9800GT to the latest beta drivers; NVIDIA_G92.DEV_0605.1. We have no information on the yields, but NVIDIA admitted that the yield problems with G92 was a big part of the surprisingly low profit during Q1, 2008. We can only hope for NVIDIA’s sake that G92b turns out well, because that means that there might be some substance to the rumors of GT200 going to 55nm in the near future.
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