NVIDIA G80 overdue for its tape-out

G80 is the next generation graphics circuit by NVIDIA, which similar to ATI’s Xenos GPU (Xbox 360) will use a unified shader architecture, an architecture Windows Vista will have full support for. G80 was suppose to be launched in due good time before ATI launch its equivalent, R600, but now we’ve received information that states that NVIDIA has missed the planned tape-out for G80, which could mean that both ATI and NVIDIA will launch its next generation graphics circuits at the same time. Tape-out is a term used for the last part of the circuit design before it is sent out to be produced. That the circuit has reached tape-out status does not necessarily mean that its ready for mass production though, e.g. it took several tape-outs before ATI was ready to launch the R520 circuit. But the fact that G80 is not sticking its schedulemight indicate that NVIDIA is having some problems.

Source: The Inquirer