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There are usually a certain percentage of parts during any manufacturing process that don't perform up to specifications. In the semiconductor industry, many of those parts will end up being speed-binned and set aside for use in less stringent applications.
NVIDIA started mass production of its GF100 GPU using their new Fermi architecture on TSMC's 40nm process in January. Yields weren't great, but they were good enough for NVIDIA to ship their GeForce GTX 480 and 470 graphics cards in April. Their primary competitor, ATI, had been shipping their own DirectX 11 5870 cards for over six months.
Faced with a surplus of chips and a lack of a mainstream performance product, NVIDIA is now launching the GeForce GTX 465 for $279. The primary difference on the graphics card is the use of a 256-bit interface and 1024MB of GDDR5.
However, the card itself uses the same cooling fan and PCB as the rest of the GTX 400 series, which means that NVIDIA's cost still remains very high. The die size of the GF100 chip is massive, measuring 23mm x 23mm for a total of 529 square millimeters. By comparison, theCypress chips used in the Radeon 5800 and 5900 series cards come in at a more moderate 334mm˛, making the GF100 almost 60% larger.
This is set to be a very strong launch for NVIDIA, with over 100,000 units expected to be ready for retail from add-in-board partners such as ASUS, EVGA, Galaxy, MSI, Palit, PNY, Zotac and others.
The GF100 chip on the GTX 465 has the same core and shader clock speeds as on the GTX 470, but a reduction in CUDA cores similar to the GTX480M means that it has a much lower number of stream processors, texture units, and ROPs. One of the four Graphics Processing Clusters has been disabled, which means that rasterization also takes a 25% hit.
Even though a large part of the GF100 is disabled, power consumption and heat generation aren't affected proportionately. The GTX 465 is rated for a Thermal Design Power of 200 watts, just 15 watts less than the GTX 470.
The specifications for the GTX 465 are similar to the GTX 480M mobile GPU announced last weekwhich will first appear in the middle of June. NVIDIA is trying to launch as many GF100 parts as possible before ATI can ready its second generation DirectX 11 GPUs, codenamed Southern Islands.
ATI had been planning a 32nm Northern Islands series of GPUs for launch this summer, but that is currently being redesigned for the 28nm process node due to problems at TSMC.
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