Primary GPU Face-Off Shifts to the Midrange
In an astounding turn of events, there shall be no showdown in high-end graphics cards or GPUs this Christmas season. Last year ATI missed its golden window of opportunity with the holiday buying season. This year NVIDIA too shall sit it out. Instead the war for graphics moves down a notch to the midrange, where more affordable NVIDIA and AMD cards vie for dominance.
AMD hopes to leverage an advantage in process manufacturing, since its RV670 will be manufactured on a 55-nm process, whereas NVIDIA will use 65 nanometers. But as the CPU wars of the past showed us between dual-core Opteron and Intel’s NetBurst microarchitecture, process isn’t everything.
AMD is launching a platform, rather than a simple GPU or family of GPUs. AMD is launching CPU, chipset, and GPU all at about the same time. NVIDIA shall attempt to do the same. The problem is NVIDIA doesn’t have a CPU. As a result, the company shall launch GPUs and possibly chipsets at or around November 12, which is the day Intel Penryn processors launch.
This match-up of the graphics chips currently codenamed RV670 and G92 will be the one to watch. Whoever wins this will sell the lion’s share of graphics cards for this price bracket and won’t have to slash prices.
Clash of the Sub-titans: AMD and NVIDIA’s Next GPU Offerings