Nvidia Corp. may be preparing a massive assault on the high-end graphics cards market with its new high-end graphics processor made using thinner process technology. The offence may be accompanied by substantial price-slash, which should increase popularity of Nvidia GeForce GTX 200-series and steal market share from ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices.

According to a picture of Nvidia G200 chip (which was published by Expreview web-site) produced using 55nm process technology (which is also known as G200b, GT200b, GT206, G200 revision B, etc), the company has been producing the chips since mid-August, 2008, for over three months now. Nevertheless, the Nvidia still has not announced the new chip formally, even though it did said at the most recent conference call with financial analysts that the new high-end chips were “ramping”.

Since three months is a long time, it is highly-likely that Nvidia already has a massive number of the new graphics boards based on the 55nm G200b/GT206 chip in stock and once they hit the market, their pricing is likely to be substantially lower than that of existing GeForce GTX 200-series boards, partly because of lower manufacturing cost, partly due to high volume of the novelties.

The original GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 graphics adapters were released commercially approximately one and a half months after the first chips were produced at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. using 65nm fabrication process.

Thinner process technologies reduce manufacturing cost, improve yields, lower power consumption or enable higher clock-speeds.

Nvidia did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: Nvidia, Geforce, 55nm, 65nm, G200b, GT206