Jawed said:
Ah yes, the infamous NV50 (G80) has been cancelled rumour.
Jawed
well i said this before but i guess i can do it again.
Nvidia is against Unified architecture citing that they wont use it until it shows benefit, and will problably continue to operate on highly programmable pipelines instead. This can benefit both in cost and dificulty to produce as well as overall speed (perhaps). I do not think they will launch their DX10 compatable products without a Unified part however. I expect them to very much launch either/or meduim/low end parts based on unified architecture. Both to get a feel for production and to aid in driver maturation for a flagship Unified part which may or may not come sometime in 2007 so that they arent releasing products that prove to be immature due to drivers. Lets face it, a retail product release helps both companies mature drivers far more then in house driver production. People can say company X has had so much time to do drivers that when it launches it will already be top notch, but i have never seen that as the case. The best performance drivers seem to come between 3-6 months after a launch and driver performance imrovments, both insignificant, and significant, continue through the products cycle.
The NV50 core has been in production for Vista and DX10 for quite a long while. Almost 2 years by my judgment. Both companies have had access to the ever changing DX10 API for well over a year. I see the "G" code named cores, as the stop gap between the NV40 and NV50. Think of it as
hey look we've had this core on the burner for awhile but Microsoft keeps changing things as well as pushing release dates, we need to do something about our product inbetween then and now or we'll be infringing on codenames. Obviously Nvidia wont change their time table or core succession, so enter the G70 and departure for the time being of the NV codename. If there is infact a G80, i very much suspect it to be launched early or mid next year, and most certainly prior to their first DX10 part. And as soon as that DX10 part is introduced, i think we'll see Nvidia go back to NV codenames. This is literally, the best and most logical reason i can come up with for any reason of their code name departure from what they have been using for the last 5+ years.
They will keep riding this tech, NV40 derivative, modifying it through-out, keeping essentially the same SM3.0 technologies, until Vista launches (now late 2006/early 2007). Once that happens, we should see a very matured and substantially impressive/complex core, technology wise from them, as i think they have been working on it(NV50) for quite a long time.
R600 im sure will be its own wonder. Although even in its launch time table i dont think it will use imbedded DRam. Costs too much and will cause problems in games. I believe it takes specific coding to use it.
Thats my theory in a nutshell.
Don't take my sig as the Conventional Wisdom! It's labeled "Wild-eyed Flyer" for a reason, y'know!
