One point four billion. That’s how many transistors the NVIDIA G200 core consists of. If you take that many transistors and try to make a chip out of them with a manufacturing process limited to 65nm lanes, you’re going to get a lot of faulty of chips per wafer. Yields were suggested to be low 40% before the launch and that the chip would become extremely expensive, $100-110. Even though this sounded a bit extreme, it might actually have been even better than reality.
The fact is that many NVIDIA partners have been left out after G200, simply because of a lack of chips. And the partners that do get cards are not happy with the margins. NVIDIA is trying hard to get the 55nm “G200b” out as soon as possible, but it doesn’t look like it will happen anytime soon. G200 at 55nm should be about 470mm2, which should make room for about 120 dies on a 300mm wafer. Hopefully this will push yields closer to 50%, but NVIDIA is probably going to be satisfied with above 40%.
On top of that, NVIDIA’s new Unilateral Minimum Advertised Price Policy (UMAP) has limited partners’ playing field and minimizes competition between them. When NVIDIA at the same time decides to launch new cards based on existing cores, at lower prices, partners get upset over diminishing earnings. Add to that AMD’s new RV770 chip is looking very tempting to some of these partners…
