Technology Transitions: Nvidia Steal-Deal Time!

The week after I published my skeptical analysis of Nvidia’s current status and future forecast, the company publicly launched its next-generation 65 nm-based GeForce GTX 260 and 280 GPUs, followed a few days later by a more subdued rollout of a 55 nm shrink of its prior-generation GeForce 9800 GTX. Frankly, there’s nothing here that causes me to rethink anything I said two weeks (and two days) back, either absolutely or relative to AMD/ATI’s just-announced two-GPU alternative approach to a particular price/performance point target.

1.4 billion transistors? 236W of power consumption just for the graphics board? $650? Just how many folks are going to buy this beast? And what sort of test yield can Nvidia hope to squeeze out of such a monstrous die size, even given the triple-core Phenom CPU-reminiscent partially functional die yield-boosting vehicle that the GTX 260 represents? Yes, I know that an eventual 55 nm shrink is inevitable, which will hopefully prop up die-per-wafer yield (both pre- and post-test) and therefore profit margin.

However, the standalone (particularly high-end standalone) graphics processor market continues to evaporate, with no down-the-road rejuvenation rationale that I can discern. With respect to highly profitable (on a per-unit basis) but "niche-y" (on a total-number-of-units basis) GPGPU, Nvidia’s late to implement full double-precision floating point support in silicon as compared to AMD/ATI. And bigger-picture, Nvidia’s lagged AMD/ATI from a leading-edge lithography adoption standpoint for several years now.

But I digress. The primary purpose of this post is actually backwards-looking, not future-focused. To wit, retailers are now closing out their inventories of two-generations-old GeForce 8600- and 8800-series boards, and until stock is depleted you can snag some killer deals. Check out these RSS tidbits from earlier today, for example:

• An eVGA GeForce 8600GT 256MB PCE-e video card, plus 2 GBytes of Crucial Tracer DDR2-800 SDRAM (two 1 GByte DIMMs), for $39.99 after rebates, with free shipping, and
• An eVGA GeForce 8800GS 384MB PCI-e 2.0 Video Card, with the same 2 GByte DDR2-800 SDRAM two-DIMM kit, for $69.99 after rebates, again with free shipping.

The GeForce 8800 is a great DX10-compliant GPU, as is its reduced-shader-core-count and slower-clock 8600 sibling; check out my January 2007 writeup for more details. And the subsequent 8xxx- to 9xxx-series generational transition was widely panned as being far less feature-momentous than the numbering increment would otherwise imply. Happy shopping, folks! And a happy weekend to you all.