If you’ve been saving your pennies and holding your breath for the new NVidia super-card, the GT300, then we’ve got some bad news for you. NVidia has gotten back the first silicon dies of the new GT300 chipset and the news is amazingly bad.
How many worked out of the (4 x 104) 416 candidates? Try 7. Yes, Northwood was hopelessly optimistic – Nvidia got only 7 chips back. Let me repeat that, out of 416 tries, it got 7 ‘good’ chips back from the fab. Oh how it must yearn for the low estimate of 20%, talk about botched execution. To save you from having to find a calculator, that is (7 / 416 = .01682), rounded up, 1.7% yield.
So 416 chips were made. 7 were “good”. And good doesn’t mean “functional”, just “as designed” (a design flaw would carry through). If they can’t iron the kinks out of the process, we may never see the GT300 as advertised.
