nVidia G70 has more pipelines to offer

Ever since the launch of nVidia’s GeForce 7800 GTX, the first card based on the G70-circuit, it’s been discussed whether 7800 GTX is the top of the line model of the 7800-series or not. Often there are words of a higher clocked version of 7800 but now the people at Beyond3D wonders if there might not be even a G70-based card with 32 pipelines instead of the 24 that GTX has. Since it is using a new manufacturing process, 110nm, it might be hard to get enough fully functioning cores from each wafer. I.e. a lot of circuits are defect.  

If the pipelines becomes defect it’s usually one or two pairs that doesn’t work since circuits are made with several pair of pipelines it is easier to first introduce a circuit that doesn’t use all pipelines.

“Could it be that, in order to alleviate this, the defect rate is already built in to the current GeForce 7800 GTX and 24 fragment shaders is not the full number that G70 supports? Whilst many have speculated on an Ultra variant still to come and have been looking at the overclocks of the GTX’s to speculate where it may hit, perhaps it could be the case that there are 32 fragment pipelines in G70 and the fully working die are quietly being collected for use at a later date?”

Whether these speculations are correct is hard to tell, but it doesn’t sound completly unreasonable. However we will probably know if they were on to something pretty soon. Surely about the same ATi launches its new graphic circuit R520.

Source: Beyond3D