Everybody we asked remained coy about the timelines. Nobody wanted to confirm anything, but one thing is certain – according to my sources, nVIDIA is not going to wait for CES 2009 to introduce its 55nm parts. Are these rumors true? Well, like any rumor, take it with a fairly large grain of salt. But I am just the messenger here, don’t shoot

The 55nm die-shrink, GT206 is already shipping in volume in the form of Quadro CX, FX 4800 and FX 5800 boards. Same story applies to Tesla cards – we saw some papers from system integrators mentioning reduced power consumption for C1060. 

And with the number of leaked pictures floating around, showing GeForce GTX260 with 896 MB of memory, talks about GTX260 with 1.79GB, GTX280 cards with 2GB of GDDR3 memory… we know at least two partners are seriously contemplating releasing the 1.79 and 2GB cards, so the battle among nVIDIA partners is definitely heating up.

But will we see a surprise (and most certainly paper) launch already this week? Only time can tell. Back in 2005, ATI had a Christmas launch of Radeon X1800XTX CrossFire Edition, aligned with the launch of Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 955. Both turned to be power-hogs and performance duds, replaced by more powerful and elegant X1900XTX, while 955 was replaced with the worst overheating CPU of all times, the 965. The stigma about 965 was so strong that Intel decided to relaunch the number with Core i7 Extreme 965. We spoke with some Intel folk, and they told me that “it was time do do 965 right”.

Will nVIDIA have more luck with Christmas launch of 55nm parts, even if its only for show? Only time will tell. For now, there are some promising facts, like single 6-pin power connector on Quadro CX and FX 4800 (effectively GTX 260).

Is this 55nm line-up?

GTX260-216 896MB

GTX260-216 1.79 GB

GTX280-240 1.0 GB

GTX280-240 2.0GB

And here lies the question. Why the company did not rename the 55nm parts to GTX270 and GTX290 – clocks are different, power is different, only cooling is the same? Well, brace for impact. According to a large nVIDIA’s partner, it seems that the company ran out of time to allow its AIB partners to print new boxes, and the decision was made to simply rename the older parts and still have new stuff to ship. I cannot validate the source, since it looks, well… just incredible – but I have to leave this option open.

All in all, 2008 turned into a big mess as far as Nvidia is concerned. The company delivered world’s first GPU with hardware FP64 dual-precision and sacrificed hefty part of the die (bear in mind that DP unit takes space as three regular ones… and there is one unit per cluster of eight), but the naming confusion is something that this company should not allow.

If the company started anew with GTX 200 series, and had prepared renaming of the old parts as G80 (Geforce 9300, 9400, 9600) and GT130 (9800GT, 9800GTX+) why oh why oh why they didn’t went with GTX 240 (for GTX260-192), GTX  260 (GTX260-216), GTX 270 (55nm part) GTX 280 (GTX 280), GTX 290 (55nm part) and end up with GX2 295 for the dual part? Logic is so easy to find in the car industry, but impossible to find in the IT industry. Both AMD, Intel, ATI and Nvidia did a fine job of crapping on their engineer’s brilliant jobs. 

What’s wrong with “AMD Phenom X4 2.5 GHz”, since that’s how most people are going to call their product anyways. Core i7 965? Call it The Overclocking Monster Core i7 3.2 GHz and we’re clear. Radeon 4870? Well, that’s a good continuation from 3870, let’s hope they won’t mess it up.

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Besides Quadro FX 4800 and 5800, the new 55nm GPU will also power GeForce GTX 270 and 290. Essentially, we’re talking about the same parts. Quadro FX 4800 is nothing more but GTX270 with double the amount of video memory, while Quadro FX 5800 is equal to GTX290, but with four times the video memory. ATI is not sleeping, as the company is preparing an RV790 part , beefed-up version of already existing RV770 chip.

G200-302 Rev A2 begun manufacturing back in September, and the first parts are now finding their way to mass manufacturing. The chip features a die size of 470mm2, 107mm2 less than the original G200 chip. This just goes to show the vast difference between 65nm and 55nm – if Nvidia had the balls to go with 55nm chip back in May, the prices of GTX260/280 parts could have been way cheaper and offer much more flexibility, but we can’t cry over spilt milk. 55nm part is here now, and it will consume much less power than is the case with the 65nm one.

The 55nm GPU consumes roughly 50% less power than it was the case with 65nm one, and this difference is more than massive. When I did quick power checks, the GTX280 at 650/1500/2200 would eat around 266W, while the default clocked GTX280 (600/1300/2200) was specc’ed at 238W.

Well, the 55nm GPU will eat around 170W at 650/1500/2200, meaning that GTX290 just got 100W of power to play with. If you’re into overclocking, you can now start dreaming about clocking those 240 shaders to 1.7-1.8 GHz range (perhaps even 2.0 if water-cooling setup is powerful enough), and achieve massive performance gains, all happening while you’re consuming less power than a stock clocked GTX280.

As far as the naming convention goes, Nvidia calls their chips NVxx (we’re at NV60 right now) or Gxx/Gxxx internally, and partners get the GT200-XXX name. But at the end of the day, the number that matters is the one on the chip.
GTX 260 and 280 both came with G200-200 and G200-300 chips, while GTX270 and 290 will feature G206-202 and G206-302 chips. Essentially, there is no difference between the two, sans the hardwired part that decides how many shaders a certain chip has. If you’re brave enough, you’ll pop the massive HIS and play around with resistors. Who knows, perhaps you can enable 240 shaders on GTX260/270… or maybe not.
In any case, we can’t wait for these new babies to show up. FX4800, FX5800, GTX270 and 290 are all coming to market very, very soon.
My personal take is that Nvidia will try to steal the limelight of official Core i7 launch on 11/17 and ship the GTX270/290 to reviewers, trying to tell them that they’re still on top. All hopes with ATI lie in the form of upcoming 4890. But still, Nvidia does not offer a compelling $199 experience and this is where ATI will take them to the cleaners.

Of course… unless you see a GTX260-216 at a completely new price point, and GTX270 costing just $50 more, dropping to $199 for Christmas. Crazy scenario, but competition brings the best for us, consumers.

UPDATE: Picture that accompanied the story did not feature GT206 chip, thus I removed it. The rest of the info is pretty valid

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