Nvidia's much-talked-about NV30 graphics chip will finally make its debut on November 18 at Comdex Fall 2002. Unlike what market speculation had earlier suggested, the new chip will not be dubbed the GeForce5, but will continue using the GeForce4 name.
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

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