Has NV40 Been Taped Out?

by Anton Shilov
09/18/2003 | 01:50 PM

Unofficial sources report that Samsung supplied some 10 thousands of its recently announced GDDR2 memory chips with extreme speed to NVIDIA for samples of the code-named NV40 GPU-based graphics cards. This suggests that the Santa Clara, California-based memory manufacturer has taped out the NV40 chips and now is ready to make some graphics cards based on the very early silicon implementation of the NV40.

We reported back on August 28, 2003, that Samsung had supplied its 1600MHz GDDR2 memory products to “leading graphics card manufacturers”. Now GPU:RW brings some more precise facts on the matter: the mentioned DRAMs had been supplied to NVIDIA Corporation for NV40 testing purposes. It makes me assume that either the NV40 graphics processor has been taped out already, or NVIDIA is about to tape out its highly-anticipated graphics chip with DirectX 9.1 support.

Peak theoretical bandwidth of 1600MHz memory on 256-bit bus is mind-blowing 51.2GB/s. In case NVIDIA utilizes so powerful memory on its NV40-based graphics cards, the latter will unbelievably leapfrog performance of the current GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and RADEON 9800 PRO solutions in a lot of cases. Unfortunately, the NV40 will not be available this year, but will come sometime in late Q1 or Q2 next year.

Well, at least now we know what kind of memory NVIDIA is considering for its NV40 at this point. It does not mean that NV40 will be equipped with 1600MHz GDDR2 memory for sure, but even this piece of information is better than nothing because we still know practically nothing about the competitor of the NV40 – ATI’s code-named R420 VPU.

No NVIDIA or Samsung representatives commented on the news-story.