According to the company, mass production of the NV30 chip is expected to begin by year-end and volume shipments in the first quarter of 2003. Two following versions of the product line, codenamed NV31 and NV34, have recently entered the tape-out stage at Nvidia foundry partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
Hoping to deliver a brand-new graphics chip architecture, Nvidia had invested around US$400 million in the past two years to develop the NV30 chip. Now with production soon to start, company president and CEO Huang Jen-hsun said that Nvidia will be able to reap results in the next two years and reclaim the position of performance leader.
In the past few quarters, Canada-based ATI Technologies, Nvidia's major rival, has been aggressively cultivating the market with a series of new chip launches. Earlier, the chip designer had gotten a step ahead of Nvidia by introducing its top-end Radeon 9700 series and landing orders from big-name companies like Dell Computer and Hewlett-Packard (HP).
The first product co-developed with 3dfx after Nvidia's acquisition of the company in December 2000, Nvidia's NV30 not only comes with a record-breaking number of transistors, but also requires a more expensive flip-chip (FC) packaging process.
Source: DigiTimes