Nvidia Corp., the world’s largest supplier of discrete graphics processing units (GPUs), reportedly plans to update its lineup of chips in mid-November this year. While according to media reports the company has no plans to dethrone its high-end GeForce 8800 Ultra with the new code-named G92 product, it is highly unlikely that Nvidia has no plans to offer a new top-of-the-range product this fall.

Several media reports claim that the G92 chip due to be commercially launched on the 12^th of November will be positioned as a performance-mainstream part, not as an ultra high-end product. The chip will sport an improved PureVideo HD video engine, PCI Express 2.0 bus, DVI, DisplayPort as well as HDMI outputs, media reports claim. It remains to be seen whether the new product will also feature DirectX 10.1 capabilities. The new chip is projected to be made using 65nm process technology at TSMC.

Earlier this year Michael Hara, vice president of investor relations at Nvidia Corp., said that the company’s forthcoming flagship product would have peak computing power close to 1TFLOPs, about two times more compared to the current code-named G80 chips, which is used on the GeForce 8800 GTS, GTX and Ultra products.

Nvidia’s code-named G80 chip was introduced in mid-November, 2006, as a high-end offering from the company. Being made using 90nm process technology, the chip featured 681 million transistors without output logic, which means that the solution was quite expensive to build.

Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia Corp. already has a history of creating an expensive solutions and then making them faster and more affordable to manufacture. In June, 2005, Nvidia introduced its G70 processor that powered the company’s GeForce 7800 family of products and had a rather large die size. Already in March, 2006, the company released its G71 chip that had the same capabilities as the predecessor, but could operate at higher clock-speeds and also was cheaper to make. While the GeForce 7900 did not offer a two times performance improvement over the predecessor, the GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card could boast with unbelievable peak computing power for that time as it featured two G71 GPUs.

Besides creating a chip that would feature over a billion of transistors, Nvidia may chose an option to produce a dual-chip graphics card based on relatively inexpensive graphics processors. Unfortunately, there is no reliable information whether Nvidia’s G92 is actually a complex high-end graphics processor, or a chip of modest complexity to replace Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS and power a dual-GPU “GX2” graphics card. 

Nvidia does not comment on the news-stories.