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NV50 in late 2005?

25-Aug-2004, 09:07.21 Reporter : DaveBaumann
Following the Games Convention in Leipzig golem.de is reporting that
following the launch of GeForce 6600 NVIDIA will move the NV4x range
into the low end segment, replacing the 5200 series with an NV4x based
version, and an notebook NV4x part will soon to be introduced on the
NVIDIA MXM notebook video board format - a look at the PCI Express
Integrators List shows NV43M, indicating that the mobile part coming
first is a version of the 6600. However, evidently NVIDIA have
signalled the end to the 12 month architectural cycle.

In statement that echoed ATI's previous sentiments, NVIDIA are
suggesting that due to chip complexities and lithography cycle times
architectural innovation times will be pushed out to about 18 months.
Although NVIDIA are suggesting similar things to ATI now, if we look
at NVIDIA's NV2x and NV3x generations, they have been on greater than
12 month cycles for the past two generations anyway (taking into
account that NV30 was launched in November 2002, which was probably
close to its intended introduction). This being the case, given NV40's
announcement and wide scale availability, it would suggest that the
NV50 series will not be announced until late 2005 with possible wide
scale availability in 2006. NVIDIA have already stated to their
investors that the low end NV4x parts will last for up to 3 years,
indicating that the NV5x range will remain the domain of the high end
segments and that NV4x will stay around until "Windows Graphics
Foundation" in Micorsofts next geneteration OS, Longhorn.

The release of Longhorn will also be critical to both NVIDIA and ATI's
plans - given the timing and the fact that there are not to be any low
end NV5x, this may suggest that NV5x is set to be an extended Shader
3.0 architecture, which would indicate that the further Longhorn moves
into 2007 the better it would suit NVIDIA's architectural innovation
cycle. Presently the expectation is that ATI will introduce their
Shader 3.0 part, suggested to be primarily developed by the R300
architectural team, in mid 2005 - ATI may be a little off their 18
month cycle as they chose not to innovate as much this cycle in order
to hit the PCI Express transition - and that would also suggest that
"R600" based parts would come in the late 2006 / early 2007 period.
Regardless of longterm exrapolated timescales, though, its likely that
both vendors will attempt to hit as close to the introduction of
Longhorn as possible.


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